Tellers of Weird Tales

Poet, Author
Born January 30, 1929, Essen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Died February 25, 1990, Los Angeles, California

Edith Ogutsch was born in Essen, Germany, on January 30, 1929. Her father, Wilhelm Ogutsch (1893-1944), was a cantor and a teacher of religion. Despite having served his country during World War I, he was Jewish, and so, under the Nazis, considered undesirable or an enemy of the State. On July 20, 1942, he and his wife were deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. At Theresienstadt, he taught and held religious services at a children’s home until his death from malnutrition and illness in 1944. His wife and Edith's mother, Erna Katz Ogutsch (1893-1971), survived the war and in 1947 immigrated to the United States. She died in New York in December 1971.

When she was ten years old, Edith Ogutsch was sent by her parents by Kindertransport to London. Eventually she was adopted by a British family named Acker in Manchester. Edith helped her adoptive family by working in their several hotels. In July 1947, she immigrated to the United States, where she was reunited with her mother and her aunt, Emmy Katz (1896-1977). Edith became a naturalized citizen in 1953.

Edith Ogutsch's poems were published in Ensign, Fiddlehead, Good Housekeeping, Negro Digest, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Riverside Quarterly, The Saturday Evening Post, Wormwood Review, and other publications. She was active in science fiction fandom and contributed to several science fiction and fantasy magazines. Following is a list of her genre poems from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (except for the first item):

A poem in Challenge #4 (Spring 1951)
"Reflections of an Egyptian Princess While Being Interred" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1954; reprinted in The Diversifier #20, May 1977)
"Musings of an Insomniac" in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (Arkham House, 1961)
"Premonition" in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (Arkham House, 1961)
"A Recluse Answers" in Omniumgathum: An Anthology of Verse by Top Authors in the Field of Fantasy (Stygian Isle Press, 1976)
"Immortality" in Omniumgathum (1976)
"Listen! The Grass is Dying" in Omniumgathum (1976)
"Nightmare Number Ten" in Omniumgathum (1976)
"Me" in Fantasy Crosswinds #2 (Jan. 1977)
"The Parade" in Fantasy Crosswinds #2 (Jan. 1977)
"Lethal Lure" in Escape #1 (Fall 1977)
"The Vampire" in Escape #1 (Fall 1977)
"A Wish Come True" in The Diversifier #23 (Nov. 1977)
"To a Meteor in a Planetarium" in Fantasy Crossroads #13 (June 1978)
"Midnight Wine" in The Anthology of Speculative Poetry #4 (1980)

In addition, Edith co-authored a short story, "The Ideas," with Ross Rocklynne, published in Witchcraft & Sorcery #5 (Jan./Feb. 1971). And she wrote two published essays on Hannes Bok, "A Memorial for Hannes Bok" in and flight of angels: The Life and Legend of Hannes Bok (1968), and "The Rambunctious Bok" in Escape #1 (Fall 1977), the latter with Bok.

Like Bok before her, Edith Ogutsch was found dead in her home, in her case, in Los Angeles on February 25, 1990. She was buried at Home of Peace Cemetery in San Diego.

Here is a science fiction limerick by Edith Ogutsch:

The alkaloid natives of Pollux
Engage in the strangest of frollux--
They each get their kicks
Chewing alkali sticks
Which makes them, of course, alkihollux.

Edith Ogutsch's Poem in Weird Tales
"Reflections of an Egyptian Princess While Being Interred" (Jan. 1954)

Further Reading

Guide to the Papers of the Ogutsch and Katz Family, 1893-1988, at the Leo Baeck Institute Center for Jewish History, New York, New York.

You can see photographs of Edith Ogutsch and others at Fun-Con 1, from July 1968, at the following URL:

http://www.lasfsinc.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=287&Itemid=514

Here is a poem from The Children's Newspaper, a British newspaper, from March 17, 1945. It shows, I think, a young poet learning her craft. We should remember that when this poem of the joy of spring was published, the poet's mother was imprisoned within the Nazi Reich, her father had already died, and the continent of Europe lay in ruins.

Edith Ogutsch's first published genre work may have been in this publication, Challenge: The Poetry of the Atomic Age #1.4 (Spring 1951). Lilith Lorraine was editor. Also represented in its pages were Clark Ashton Smith, Stanton A. Coblentz, Evelyn Thorne, Vera L. Eckert, Orma McMormick, Isabelle E. Dinwiddie, Emili A. Thompson, Michael Wolf, Clive Jackson, Alan Donovan, Dariell Dunay, and others.

Editor, Publisher, Journalist, Author, Poet
Born June 25, 1872, Iowa
Died September 22, 1951, Los Angeles, California

Edgar Lloyd Hampton was born on June 25, 1872, in Iowa, but he lived most of his life on the West Coast. The 1893 catalogue of Pacific College, in Newberg, Oregon, lists a student named Edgar L. Hampton of Dundee, Oregon. Whether that was our Edgar or not, Hampton was in Seattle by 1900, working as a newspaperman. Hampton remained in that city for at least ten years, publishing and editing the Seattle Saturday Mail (ca. 1900) and working, possibly as editor, on the Seattle Mail and Herald (to 1904). In 1904, he purchased the weekly Commonwealth and began as editor on a journal called The Westerner, An Interpretation of the West. His associate editor was poet Ella Higginson (1861-1940).

By 1920, Hampton was in Los Angeles, and he appears to have lived in southern California for the rest of his life. He took a special interest in this rapidly growing region and wrote articles for a number of publications, listed below. Hampton was also an author of short stories, serials, and poems. Those, too, are listed below.

Articles

"With the Publishers" in The Westerner, Apr. 1909 and Nov. 1909
"They Made Us Strike" in The Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 12, 1919
"The Case for Boulder Dam" in American Review of Reviews, Dec. 1922
"Cheap Power As a City Developer" in SCB [sic], May 1923
"Los Angeles, a Miracle City" in Current History, Apr. 1926
"Los Angeles as an American Art Centre" in Current History, Sept. 1926
"Transporting a River Over Mountains" in Scientific American, Apr. 1, 1927
"The Open Shop Movement as an Aid to Prosperity" in Industrial Digest, Sept. 1928
"Curses on Our Climate" in Los Angeles Times, Jan. 26, 1932

Stories and Poems

"A Measure of Wheat" in The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 10, 1903
"The Law Breakers" in Tulsa Daily World, Dec. 27, 1914
"The Outlaw" in Collier's, May 1, 1915
"Skippy Limited" in The American Magazine, Oct. 1915
"The Peace Call" (poem) in The Century, Mar. 1919
"Seeing Faces" in Detective Story Magazine, Sept. 16, 1919
"The Return of Foo Chow" in Metropolitan Magazine, Mar. 1920; reprinted in The Golden Book, Jan. 1928
"The Rolling Stone" in Sunset, The Pacific Monthly, Nov. 1920
"The Wind in the South" (serial) in McClure's, May 1921
"The Old Burying Ground" in Weird Tales, Sept. 1923
"Vanishing Fractions" in Argosy All-Story Weekly, Apr. 3, 1926

Hampton was the editor of at least one book, Then and Now: 100 Landmarks Within 50 Miles of Los Angeles Civic Center with compiler Mrs. A.S.C. Forbes (1939).

Edgar Lloyd Hampton died on September 22, 1951, in Los Angeles, and was buried at Glen Haven Memorial Park in Sylmar, California.

Edgar Lloyd Hampton's Story in Weird Tales

"The Old Burying Ground" (Sept. 1923)

Further Reading

None known.

A photograph and biographical snippet from Sunset, The Pacific Monthly, November 1920.

Then and Now: 100 Landmarks within 50 Miles of Los Angeles Civic Center, edited by Hampton (1939).

Née Marie Florence Giles
Poet, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Biographer
Born May 15, 1883, Morristown, New Jersey
Died March 20, 1960, Hollywood, California

Weird Tales was a magazine with a special appeal to women, and, in general, there was no shame or embarrassment in having one's name in its pages. Most of the women who contributed to the magazine used their own names. A few employed pseudonyms or their first and middle initials. Fewer still--three at least--used their husband's names: Mrs. Chetwood Smith (Mary Chapin Smith), Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith, and Mrs. Edgar Saltus. In their time, not many readers would have known the names of the two Smiths. There would not have been much cachet there. But in the early part of the twentieth century, Edgar Saltus (1855-1921) was a familiar figure among the reading public. Being known as Mrs. Edgar Saltus would have carried some weight and probably helped to sell a few books.

Mrs. Edgar Saltus was born Marie Florence Giles in Morristown, New Jersey, on May 15, 1883--or at least that's the year on her memorial. According to a contemporary article in The Writer (below), Marie F. Giles published her book The End of the Journey when she was seventeen. As near as I can make out, the year of publication for that book was 1897, meaning she was born in about 1880 rather than 1883. In any case, Marie began writing when she was quite young and had her first books published before she was twenty. Following is a list of her credits:

The End of the Journey (New York: G.W. Dillingham Co., 1897)
Though Your Sins Be as Scarlet (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1898)
Her Game of Consequences (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1898)
"As a Man Thinketh" (short story) in The Arena, July 1902
"Kaivalya" (short story) in Weird Tales, Dec. 1924
"Reincarnation" (poem) in Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 2, 1925
Edgar Saltus: The Man (biography, 1925)
Poppies and Mandragora (verse, 1926) by Edgar Saltus and Marie Giles Saltus

The following article tells a little more about her:

From The Writer, Volume 15 (1902), p. 152.

Marie Giles met her future husband when she was quite young as well. Early into her writing career and imagining herself "an embryonic Ouida," she was introduced to Edgar Saltus on the beach at Narragansett Pier in Rhode Island. The year was probably no later than 1900. He was then more than twice her age and married to his second wife. (1) "Startlingly handsome," with a reputation as "a Don Juan and a Casanova rolled into one," he immediately began wooing young Marie. In their first conversation, they spoke of reincarnation among other things. "From the time I was able to think at all," she told him, "I remembered many events from former lives." Whether by her prompting or his own searching, Saltus "began to study along a new line," Marie remembered, continuing:

Puzzled and confused as to what he really believed, he agreed to study the sacred books of the East. None were omitted,--the Zend-Avesta, the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Mahabharata--with its jewel the Bhagavad-Gitâ,--the Egyptian Book of the Dead,--the Talmud and the Koran.

Between their leaves he found a new world. Thereafter he was forever digging for jewels,--which when found dazzled him with their beauty. With the enthusiasm Balboa may have felt at discovering an unknown ocean, Mr. Saltus went up the heights to the Garden of God, steeping himself in the perfume of occult and esoteric lore. Subconsciously, he had found food for his soul.

If he was in fact a seeker of wisdom and truth--as we all are, each in his or her own manner--then it can be little wonder that Edgar Saltus fell in love with Marie Florence Giles, for she had given him "food for his soul." (2)

In 1909, Edgar Saltus made a confession of faith, announcing that he had found in Theosophy "a solution to the mystery of life":

From the Los Angeles Herald, Sept. 9, 1909.

Although he didn't mention Marie Giles in the article above, Saltus seems to have owed his achieving "complete contentment" to her. According to John V. Glass, she was the person who "introduced him to theosophy [sic] and the occult." (3)

After many years of chasing after the young author, Saltus finally secured a divorce from his second wife, and he and Marie were married on August 16, 1911. They spent the next decade together until his death on July 31, 1921. She recounted their time together in Edgar Saltus: The Man, described as an "extremely intimate and sometimes scandalously frank biography of her husband." (4)

According to Wikipedia, "Kaivalya . . . is the ultimate goal of Raja yoga and means 'solitude,''detachment' or 'isolation'." It is also the title of Mrs. Saltus' only story for Weird Tales, from December 1924. She followed that up with a poem, "Reincarnation," in Argosy All-Story Weekly for May 2, 1925. Those two works, along with the short story "As a Man Thinketh," from The Arena, July 1902, are her only known genre works. They also involve Eastern mystical concepts. (5)

"As a Man Thinketh" is an interesting story for students of fantasy, science fiction, and their penumbrae. First, it shows that, even early on, Marie Giles was "deeply interested in metaphysical research and mental science," as the first article above says. That deep interest helped to convert her husband and seems to have carried throughout her life.

Second, the story is an example of how science, more accurately pseudoscience, became and is hopelessly entangled with pseudoreligion and science fiction. I would add pseudohistory to that entanglement as well. All as we know them--pseudoscience, pseudoreligion, pseudohistory, and science fiction--originated or evolved in the nineteenth century. The ideas behind Theosophy, Christian Science, and Lysenkoism (a twentieth-century outgrowth of the pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and pseudoreligion of Marxism) are evident in "As a Man Thinketh." Other such belief systems from the 1800s include the hollow earth theory, phrenology, mesmerism, spiritualism, and socialism. All or most have also shown up in science fiction and fantasy.

Finally, "As a Man Thinketh" has a construction that later readers of Weird Tales would have recognized: the club-story format, the upper-class milieu, the use of diary entries, newspaper articles, and other documents to tell part of the story, and, more than anything, the twist ending, right down to the italicized print and the shocking revelation in the last sentence!

Marie Florence Giles Saltus survived her husband by nearly forty years. She died on March 20, 1960, in Hollywood, California, at age seventy-six. Her earthly remains were cremated and placed in the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles. Two other people connected to fictional reanimation--Helen Chandler and Colin Clive--are also interred there. If she was right in her beliefs, Mrs. Edgar Saltus--Marie Florence Giles--may very well be walking among us today. (6)

Notes

(1) Edgar Saltus was married three times, first, to Helen Sturgis Read in November 1883; second, to Elsie Welch Smith on October 8, 1895; and third, to Marie Florence Giles on August 16, 1911.

(2) The quotes are from Edgar Saltus: The Man by Marie Saltus (1925). The entire text of the book is available on Project Gutenberg at the following URL:

http://gutenberg.polytechnic.edu.na/3/7/3/9/37398/37398-h/37398-h.htm

(3) From "Saltus, Edgar [Evertson]" in The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature, edited by Steven R. Serafin and Alfred Bendixen (A & C Black, 2005), p. 986.

(4) From "In Brief Review," in The Bookman, Dec. 1925, p. 504.

(5) You can read "As a Man Thinketh" by clicking here.

(6) Marie Giles' grandmother was Mrs. Peter Darlington, who lived under every American president except George Washington until her death on August 20, 1899, at age 101.

Mrs. Edgar Saltus' Story in Weird Tales

"Kaivalya" (Dec. 1924)

Further Reading

Edgar Saltus: The Man by Marie Saltus (1925), link above.

You can read Marie F. Giles' story "As a Man Thinketh" by clicking here.

Marie Saltus in a painting from 1925 by Hope Bryson (1887-1944). This image is from Marie's book Edgar Saltus: The Man. The caption reads: "Sitting at the Table on which her Husband wrote his Books, burning Incense before a Siamese Buddha and meditating on a Stanza from the Bhagavad Gitâ." This image could almost have been a cover for Weird Tales.

Née Edith Wild
Journalist, Author, Teacher
Born ?
Died July 13, 1950, Albany, New York

The authors and artists who contributed to Weird Tales came from all walks of life and lived in earth's every quarter. Their lives and experiences were varied beyond description. They of course included men who went to war, in the Great War, before the magazine was founded, and afterwards in the Second World War and the Korean War. One teller of weird tales was even kept as a Japanese prisoner of war. Surprisingly that POW was a woman.

Edith de Garis, born Edith Wild, was the second wife of Frederic de Garis of Tacoma, Washington, later of Patchogue, Long Island. (1) Frederick de Garis' first wife was Isabel Carman (1855-1903), whom he married on November 11, 1891, in Patchogue. She died a dozen years later on her forty-eighth birthday. I don't know the date or place of Frederic de Garis' marriage to Edith Wild, but by 1922, she had taken his name and was living in Japan, having first arrived in the archipelago in 1917. Then or later, she wrote for the Japan Advertiser and the Japan Times.

Edith de Garis visited Patchogue in early 1922. Her husband was then still in Japan where he served as "director of publicity and editor of the English edition of the guide books of the Japanese Government Railway." (2) Over the course of his career in Japan, de Garis wrote Their Japan with Gaines Sensai (1936) and We Japanese (volume one, 1934). He was also an inventor. Edith wrote a piece on Japanese astrology for her husband's book We Japanese. She also wrote a story for Weird Tales, "The Dragon Girl," published in the January 1932 issue of the magazine.

After Frederic de Garis died in 1935, Edith de Garis taught at Tsuda College, a women's college; Aoyama Gakuin; and St. Margaret's High School, an Episcopal school for girls located in Tokyo. Although she returned to the United States at least once before the war began, Edith was back in Japan by 1942. On September 16, 1942, she was taken prisoner by the Japanese government and confined to a prison facility within a Catholic orphanage. A source on the Internet states that Edith was held at Sekiguchi-Koishikawaku Civilian Camp near Tokyo for four years, but one or both of those pieces of information are in error, as she departed Japan for the United States on September 14, 1943. You can read about her internment in a newspaper article called "Aunt of Local Resident Arrives on 'Gripsholm' from Japan: Mrs. Edith deGaris [sic] Tells of Experiences While Interned in East" in the Mill Brook Round Table (New York), December 17, 1943, page 1, here.

Edith Wild de Garis lived another six and a half years after being freed. She passed away on July 13, 1950, at Child's Hospital in Albany, New York.

Notes

(1) One source claims that Frederic de Garis was a pseudonym for Shozo Yamaguchi, but that claim is in doubt. On the other hand, de Garis is hard to find in public records and I have almost nothing about him. I hope someone can help clear up the confusion.

(2) In "Notes from the Advance Files, 35 Years Ago, March 31, 1922,"Patchogue Advance, Mar. 28, 1957.

Edith de Garis' Story in Weird Tales

"The Dragon Girl" (Jan. 1932)

Further Reading

The obituary of Edith de Garis, "Former Prisoner of Japan During War Succumbs in Albany," was in the Troy, New York, Times Record on July 14, 1950, page 12.

Marion Carrère Black
Aka Marion Black Vaccaro
Poet, Author, Artist, Tutor, Friend and Traveling Companion
Born January 17, 1906, New York
Died April 14, 1970, Miami, Florida

I no longer have access to Ancestry.com or ProQuest or some of the other sources I used when I began writing this blog. These past several months, I have been forced to take a different tack. I would like access to the websites I used before, but I'm making do without them, and it isn't as hard as I thought it would be. The difference between now and years past--even very recently past--is that these days there is so much more information available on non-subscription websites. The rate at which information is proliferating on the Internet only seems to be increasing. I can foresee a time when much of it--maybe all of it--will be free. So what does that mean to the researcher? Well, for one, it makes your life easier, but more importantly, it means that so many of the unknowns are going to drop away. I am seeing that for myself. If unanswered questions are the opposing force, I feel like I'm going to war against an army of cardboard cutouts. There is little resistance to inquiry. The facts are surrendered almost without a fight.

Here's a case in point: In The Collector's Index to Weird Tales by Sheldon Jaffery and Fred Cook (1985), there is listed a writer named Marson Carrere, author of the short story "The Guilty Man" from February 1924. That name, Marson, is a misprint. In the issue-by-issue index in the same book, the name is listed correctly as Marion Carrere. The identity of that person appears to be unknown, at least on the Internet. As I have said before, though, mystery attracts inquiry. The greater the mystery, the greater the intrigue. And the mystery of Marion Carrere went down with little fight.

The surname Carrere is not very common. In doing your research, you should begin with something that is unlikely to result in your being swamped by thousands of results in your search. So a search for "Marion Carrere" results in this:

That entry is from Who's Who in New York, 1907, p. 139, and there she is, Marion Carrère, born in 1906 to Reverend Robert Mickleberry Williamson Black and Clara Elliott (Atwood) Black. So in searching for "Marion Carrere Black," I came up with this article:

That article comes from the New York Sun, March 6, 1934, page 3, and tells of Marion Carrere [sic] Black's lineage and of her impending wedding to Regis Vaccaro of New Orleans. So now I had her married name. And what does a search for "Marion Black Vaccaro" give back? Everything.

Marion Carrère Black Vaccaro was a close friend of Tennessee Williams, "at one point," he wrote in his Memoirs, "she was perhaps my most devoted friend . . . ." (p. 63) Williams (1911-1983) and the researchers who study him and his life have written much about her, so I won't duplicate their efforts. Instead, I'll just refer you to their work:

Memoirs by Tennessee Williams (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1975)
"Tenn and the Banana Queen: The Correspondence of Tennessee Williams and Marion Black Vaccaro" by Philip C. Kolin, from The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2006, online here.
"Marion Black Vaccaro" on Find A Grave, here.

That's a start. There are other sources in print, online, and tucked away in the world's libraries. Philip C. Kolin's article is particularly good and thorough. It gives a window onto worlds that are now gone forever.

Tennessee Williams described his friend Marion as "a well-educated woman with fine taste in literature," adding, "she was a very talented poet." (Memoirs, p. 63) (1) Under the name Marion Carrere, she wrote a little for Breezy Stories, Droll Stories, and Weird Tales. Her only story for "The Unique Magazine" appeared in the February 1924 issue. She had just turned eighteen years old, and it may have been her first published work. Williams' only story for Weird Tales, "The Vengeance of Nitocris," was published in August 1928 when he was seventeen, and it was his first published story. The two didn't meet until many years later, in 1941. I wonder if they ever talked about their common experience of being teenaged authors for Weird Tales.

In his article on their friendship, Mr. Kolin tells of a book of poems (and one story) handwritten and illustrated by Marion Vaccaro, which came into Williams' possession after her death. Mr. Kolin writes: "[T]he prevalence of death and other pessimistic subjects perhaps suggest Williams's influence." Maybe there are more weird tales from the pen of Marion Carrère waiting to be published. Here are her known credits otherwise:

"The Guilty Man" in Weird Tales (Feb. 1924)
"Traveling Expenses" in Droll Stories (Apr. 1924)
"Confession" in Breezy Stories (June #1, 1924)
"Presence of Mind" in Droll Stories (June 1924)

That's not the end of her work in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction, however. This is the strange part: Marion Black Vaccaro was a production assistant on Wild Women of Wongo, a movie about cavewomen released in 1958.

Marion's later years were marked by health problems and concerns about aging. Marion Carrère Black Vaccaro died on April 14, 1970, in Miami, Florida, at age sixty-four. Tennessee Williams survived her by nearly a quarter century and died on February 25, 1993, in New York City.

As for the unanswered questions that are so rapidly being answered, well, I hope we will always have mysteries, as a universe without mysteries wouldn't be very interesting at all.

Note

(1) Williams called Marion's husband, Regis Vaccaro (1907-1946), "a likable guy" but "the worst alcoholic I have ever known in my life." Drunk, sober, or somewhere in between, he once removed his glass eyeball and flung it at his mother-in-law. It landed in her soup bowl. "[W]ithout a change of expression or intonation," Williams remembered, she dipped it out with her spoon, passed it to Marion, and said to her, "Sister, I think Regis has lost this." (Memoirs, pp. 65-66).

Wild Women of Wongo (1958) has among its credits Marion Black Vaccaro as production assistant.

The year before, Tennessee Williams had dedicated his play Orpheus Descending to her. Here they are together. "She was not a classic beauty," he wrote after her death, "but she had great charm and animation. . . . I loved her deeply . . . ." (Memoirs, pp. 63 and 68)

Author

Born ?

Died ?

In my last entry, I wrote about how easily unanswered questions are being answered in this Internet age. Well, not so fast.

Abrach was the author of one story in Weird Tales, "The Plaid," from July 1952. The name is almost certainly a pseudonym. If you're looking for some deeper meaning to the word Abrach, you might think that it's made up of the first few letters of the magic word Abracadabra, with an h on the end of it. That doesn't do any good because it doesn't mean anything. Another possibility is that Abrach is related to the Greek magic or mystic word Abraxas or Abrasax, which may also be related to Abracadabra. But again, a magic-word explanation isn't a very good one. There are better clues in the story itself.

"The Plaid" is set in Scotland. It's a weird story rather than a fantasy or horror story or ghost story. In fact, the words weird, wraith, uncanny, eerie, and rowan, all of which are Scottish or Old English in origin and all of which refer to the strange or supernatural, are in it. (1, 2, 3) The Scottish setting, words, and names are clues as to the author's name or place of origin, if not his identity.

As it turns out, Abrach is a Scottish surname, also part of a clan name. (4) Curiously, abrach is also a word used in reference to stones, specifically a kind of millstone or grinding stone. From History of Corn Milling, Volume 1: Handstones, Slaves & Cattle Mills by Richard Bennett and John Elton (1898):

The peculiar term "abrach," applied to these kind of stones, has reference not to their nature or quality, but to their supposed place of origin, the term "abrach," or, more correctly, "aberach,"indicating an origin in Lochaber; though, curiously enough, the stone from which abrach querns were made is not found at Lochaber. As a rule, the abrach was smaller than the ordinary quernstone. (p. 159)

A quernstone is a hand grinding stone, while Lochaber is a region in the west Scottish Highlands. (5) Aberach, like Abrach, is a Scottish surname or clan name originating in Lochaber. The root of the word is aber, meaning estuary or the mouth of a river or the confluence of two rivers. Abrach or Aberach would seem to have originated in a place with just such a body of water, such as in Lochaber. The meaning of the place name Lochaber seems to have been lost. (6)

So Abrach is a Scottish surname and probably an indication as to its place of origin. Those facts lead me to believe that the author of "The Plaid" was a Scottish author, or a British, Canadian, or American author of Scottish descent or with close ties to Scotland. He or she may have been of the clans from which the Abrachs came, or have had origins in Lochaber. Weird Tales was full of stories from Scottish, British, Canadian, and Scottish-American authors. The editor, Dorothy McIlwraith (1891-1976), was also of Scottish descent. Although she was born in Canada, her grandfather came from Scotland, more precisely from Ayrshire, adjacent to Lochaber. She also received her education, in part, from Scotland, though by correspondence. And she traveled to Scotland at least once. "The Plaid" takes place during the war years and is told in the voice of a man in the form of a letter written by a military man to another man, his friend, who works in government. It tells about things from a man's point of view and in a man's way. I don't think the author was a woman and almost certainly not Dorothy McIlwraith, although I wouldn't rule it out. However, I wonder if the Weird Tales editor got the story from a friend or acquaintance who was in the war and who preferred to remain anonymous for whatever reason. Now that the records and correspondence of Weird Tales are gone, we may never know.

To be concluded . . .

Abrach's Story in Weird Tales

"The Plaid" (July 1952)

Further Reading

You can read "The Plaid" at UNZ.org, here.

Notes

(1) So is the Scottish word guddling, meaning to catch a fish with the bare hands. The synonym tickling is also used in explanation. I first heard of the practice when I lived in Missouri, where it's called noodling. So I find on Wikipedia that the origin of the word noodling is unknown. Ozark culture came from Appalachian culture as I understand it, and Appalachian culture is Scots-Irish. It seems to me that noodling is close enough to guddling for there to be a connection or derivation.

(2) The name of the stream in the story is Luath, no doubt drawn from the Irish, quick or fast. The names of the characters, Shemas, Johan, and Morag, are all Scottish names with English equivalents, but Morag is also the name given to a purported monster in Loch Morar, Scotland. The woman's name came first. The monster's name Morag is probably a pun on the name of the loch. The last name of the family in "The Plaid" is MacGillivray.

(3) In the story, a rowan tree grows in the yard "to guard the house from evil." Other plants are mentioned, too. All of these are at the beginning of the story. At the end, as a kind of bracket, is mention of a hazel tree. Like the rowan tree, hazel is supposed to possess magical, mystical, or folkloric powers.

(4) For example, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, a West Highland Scottish clan, is also called Clann Iain Abrach. Glencoe, I should note, is a town in Lochaber. The surnames Aberigh, Naverigh, and Naverich are related to Abrach and Aberach.

(5) Quern is another Old English word.
(6) Or at least confused. For a discussion of the place name Lochaber, see Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 1886-1887, Vol. 13, pp. 258-259, here.

Abrach, author of "The Plaid" in Weird Tales, July 1952, was very likely a pseudonymous author. As I wrote in the first part of this article, the name Abrach offers clues as to the author's place of origin, for it is a Scottish surname, probably originating in Lochaber, in the west Scottish Highlands.

There are several names in "The Plaid." The story is in the form of a letter (dated June 1, 1941) from a Raymond Sedgwick, serving in "His Majesty's Forces in northern Scotland," to Rolfe Hayter, his friend in London. The story is about a Scottish family, Shemas and Johan MacGillivray and their young daughter Morag. A Mrs. Munro also appears in the story, and there is reference made to "that medium we heard at the Harrisons." Those names may offer further clues as the identity of the author.

Weird Tales was full of Scottish authors, or Canadian or American authors with Scottish surnames. Examples include Estil Critchie, Arlton Eadie, Ainslee Jenkins, and James MacCreigh. It's interesting that all of those names are pseudonyms. Ray McGillivray, who wrote "The Forty Jars" (Apr. 1923) is another example of an author with a Scottish surname. Perhaps significantly, his surname is the same as the family in "The Plaid," only with an Mc instead of an Mac. His Christian name is the same as that of the narrator. So could Ray McGillivray have been the mysterious Abrach? Maybe.

Here's a wrench in the works of that idea: According to the website Author and Book Info.com, Ray McGillivary was a pseudonym used by the American author Anthony Melville Rud (1893-1942). Rud also wrote for Weird Tales. His story "Ooze" was the cover story in the first issue of the magazine (Mar. 1923). He also had a story in the second issue, "A Square of Canvas" (Apr. 1923), the same issue in which "The Forty Jars" appeared. In the pulp fiction era, it was common for magazines to use pseudonyms so as to seem to offer a greater variety of authors to their readers. The problem here is that Rud's supposed pseudonym, Ray McGillivary, has a different spelling than the name of Ray McGillivray, the author of "The Forty Jars." The difference is slight, though, and I think negligible. If Anthony Rud was Ray McGillivary, he was probably also Ray McGillivray. Likewise, the name McGillivray, the presumed pseudonym, has a spelling that is slightly different than the name MacGillivray, the family name in "The Plaid." Again, the difference is negligible.

Here's another wrench in the works, though: Anthony Rud died in 1942, after the date in the story, but ten years before it was published. Could he still have been the author, and, for whatever reason, his story was not published until 1952? Could the story have been previously published under a different title and author's name? Weird Tales is known to have dug up old stories and even to have reprinted them with altered titles and authors' names. So, yes, those things are possibilities.

Two more things and then the end: First, Anthony Rud was of Norwegian descent on his father's side, but his mother's family came from Canada. Her maiden name was Piper. Rud used her surname in another of his pseudonyms, Anson Piper. I wonder if he could have used a name from farther back in his family line, namely, Mac or McGillivray or Mac or McGillivary, for his other pseudonym. I don't know that those names appeared in his family tree, though. Second, is the name or clan of MacGillivray related to the name or clan of McIlwraith, Dorothy McIlwraith's family? Both originated in the region of Ayrshire and Lochaber. One form of MacGillivray is MacIlvray, which seems to me awfully close to McIlwraith. Maybe Dorothy McIlwraith dug up the story "The Plaid" from somewhere in Scotland or England among her family, friends, or acquaintances. Or maybe it was in fact the work of Anthony Rud and she cottoned to it because of its relationship to her family, clan, region, or nation.

The mystery of Abrach shows few signs of clearing.

Next: Anthony M. Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder

Anthony M. Rud

Aka Ray MacGillvary, Anson Piper, and probably also Ray McGillivray

Author, Editor

Born January 11, 1893, Chicago, Illinois

Died November 30, 1942, New York, New York

Anthony Melville Rud was born on January 11, 1893, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of two physicians, Dr. Anthony Rud (1867-1928) and Dr. Alice Florence (Piper) Rud (1871-1941), both of whom practiced in the Chicago area. Anthony M. Rud wrote of his father:

My father, who is Dr. Anthony Rud of Chicago, was born in Kongsberg, near Mt. Gausta, Norway, but came alone to America at the age of 12, as soon as he had completed the grammar school. He lived for five years on Koshkonong prairie, seven miles north of Edgerton [Wisconsin], and two miles south of Rockdale, Dane county (at that time Clinton). From 17 until 20 he raised three crops of tobacco on shares, and was very successful. He worked his way through Milton prep and two years of Milton college [sic], getting his B.S. degree in 1887. After that Northwestern Medical, the Physicians and Surgeons of New York and on to Berlin and Vienna. In 1891 he received his M.D. degree from Northwestern University Medical school and also his M.S. from Milton. (1)

Dr. Rud was on the staff of West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois. He was also a fellow of the American Medical Association and a member of the Illinois State Medical Society and the Chicago Medical Society. Dr. Rud died on February 23, 1928, in Orlando, Florida.

Dr. Alice Florence (Piper) Rud, of Canadian descent but also a Daughter of the American Revolution, was from Austin, Illinois. She received her medical degree from Women's Medical College of Chicago on April 2, 1889, one of two-dozen women in her class. Dr. Rud competed by written examination with twenty-four men and five women for internships at Cook County Hospital. She was one of only two women to win that position in that round of testing. After completing her internship, Dr. Rud practiced medicine in the Austin neighborhood of west Chicago, from 1895 onward. She was also a member of many clubs and groups. Dr. Alice Rud died on May 23, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois.

The two doctors were married on March 15, 1892, in Cook County, Illinois. Their children were Anthony Melville Rud, Natalie Margaret Rud (later Mrs. James Chandler Hatcher), and Bertha Piper Rud, who died in 1901 at age six.

Anthony Melville Rud attended St. John's Military School in Delafield, Wisconsin, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1914. Afterwards, he studied medicine for two years at Rush Medical College in Chicago. In 1913, when he was only twenty years old, Rud had his name tied to a murder, though only in the most peripheral way. Once mentioned, his name was never again brought up in relation to the case. For a time, though, he and his parents must have been filled with alarm and anxiety.

To be continued . . .

Note

(1) Quoted in "Alexander Corstvet and Anthony M. Rud, Norwegian-American Novelists" by Albert O. Barton in The Norwegian-American Historical Association [NAHA] Online (Vol. VI, p 146), here.

A portrait drawing of Anthony Melville Rud by pulp artist Hubert Rogers (1898-1982).

On the afternoon of September 26, 1913, Mildred Allison Rexroat, dressed in a dark blue suit, wearing a new hat and white gloves, adorning herself with several hundred dollars worth of jewelry, and carrying a white handbag and a rattan suitcase, left her Chicago rooming house for an appointment with a man she named only as "Mr. Spencer." Mrs. Rexroat was a tango dancer and dance instructor. Inside her suitcase was a pink dancing outfit. She was going to meet with Mr. Spencer to talk about tango dance lessons. Neither her roommate, nor her three children, nor her husband, nor her ex-husband ever saw her again.

That evening, at about 8:23 p.m., a freight train running on the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railroad struck a dark object on the tracks as it was approaching the village of Wayne, located in DuPage County, west of Chicago. The crew operating the train stopped and went back to see what they had hit. The object, the body of a woman, severed at the waist, was identified the next day as that of Mildred Rexroat. Her death was not an accident. She had in fact been murdered.

At about midday on October 3, Joseph Delahanty and Lee Durkin, two Wayne residents were searching the murder scene when they discovered, about 100 feet away from where Mrs. Rexroat's body was found, a three-pound hammer wrapped in a towel, which was in turn wrapped in a copy of the Chicago Tribune. One of the men told a reporter:

Right near the place, we found two cards and a salesman's slip. On the cards was the name, "Anthony Melville Rud." The paper slip indicated that a salesman at Marengo, Ill., had been negotiating with the firm of Luhring & Schedd.

We were just going to call up Sheriff Kuhn and turn the stuff over to him to see what it was worth, when two men came up the track. They said they were Pinkerton detectives, and would have to take the clews [sic] right to headquarters. They gave each of us $2. Later I learned they were reporters. (1)

Following one of those leads, Marengo city marshal M.L. St. John interviewed personnel at Luhring & Schedd by long-distance telephone. They were not able to offer any information pertinent to the case.

On Sunday night, October 5, chief of detectives Capt. Halpin and two police officers arrested a man named Henry C. Spencer at his flat on Rhodes Avenue in Chicago in connection with the murder. Awhile later, at a Chicago police station, Spencer, fully informed of his rights, confessed to killing Mildred Allison Rexroat. "I killed Mrs. Rexroat because she was trying to make a sucker out of me," Spencer admitted. "She thought she was working me the same way she worked the farmers. She thought I was a farmer like her husband and that she could work me the same way." (2) Spencer described the murder:

When we got out at the station, it was nearly 8 o'clock. We turned around and walked the track until we got where it was dark. I took her right arm, pulled out my gun and shot her through the head. Then I laid her on the railroad track so she would get tore up. (3)

The hammer later found at the scene of the crime was placed there by Spencer before the murder. His plan was that if he failed to kill Mrs. Rexroat with his revolver, he would use the hammer to beat her to death.

In all, Henry C. Spencer confessed to about two dozen murders, but it was for killing Mildred Allison Rexroat, the Chicago tango dancer, that he swung on July 31, 1914, in DuPage County, Illinois.

After that newspaper article of October 4, 1913, in which two men described finding cards with the name Anthony Melville Rud, there was no more mention of that name in connection with the case, at least that I can find. I suspect that an interview with Rud, coupled with the fact that his parents were prominent and respected physicians, eliminated the young man from any suspicion. Rud would go on to write about murder in his career as a pulp writer.

To be concluded . . .

Notes
(1) Quoted in "Unearth Hammer from Murder Scene,"Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1913, p. 3.
(2) Quoted in "Wholesale Murderer,"Deseret News, October 6, 1913, p. 1.
(3) Ditto.

Henry C. "Harry" Spencer (center), born Jindred Shortna in 1877, is shown here leaving an interrogation session, escorted by detectives Trant and John O'Keefe. The date is sometime in October 1913. This photograph was published in the Chicago Daily News and is now in the negatives collection of the Chicago Historical Society. As far as I can tell, there aren't any images of Spencer's victim, Mildred Semrow Allison Rexroat (Jan. 1876-Sept. 26, 1913), on the Internet. I wonder if there are any at all.

Aka Anson Piper, Ray McGillivray
Author, Editor
Born January 11, 1893, Chicago, Illinois
Died November 30, 1942, New York, New York

Anthony Melville Rud was twenty years old when Mildred Allison Rexroat was murdered in September 1913. In 1914, Rud graduated from Dartmouth College. He studied at Rush Medical College in downtown Chicago for two years. If those two years followed immediately upon his graduation, then he left Rush Medical College in 1916. So what else happened in 1916? He had his first work published in a national magazine.

At least that's according to the list on the website of The FictionMags Index. (Click here and here to see it.) That work was an article rather than a story. It was called "'Love at First Sight' Analyzed," and it appeared in Illustrated World for December 1916. Rud's article has a clinical sort of title. Presumably he was still studying medicine when he wrote it. A month after it was published, he turned twenty-four. From then on out, nearly all of his works listed by The FictionMags Index were works of fiction. By the time he was in his mid twenties, Anthony Rud, son of two doctors, had begun writing for the lowly pulps.

I won't list all of Rud's stories listed in The FictionMags Index, but I would like to give the titles of the first nine because their titles are so intriguing. They also indicate that Rud was working in a variety of genres or sub-genres. All nine are evidently part of the adventures of a detective character named Jigger Masters, and all were published in The Green Book Magazine except "When Chicago Was Put to Sleep," which was in Top-Notch Magazine. "The October Blight" was Rud's first published story according to the aforementioned list.

"The October Blight" (Mar. 1918)
"The Fiery Meteor" (Apr. 1918)
"The Vengeance of the Wah Fu Tong" (May 1918)
"The Red Billiard-Ball Mystery" (June 1918)
"The Miltonvale Nemesis" (July 1918)
"The Giant Footprints" (Aug. 1918)
"When Chicago Was Put to Sleep" (Top-Notch Magazine, Sept. 15, 1918)
"The Specter at Macey’s" (Sept. 1918)
"The Affair at Steffen Shoals" (Oct. 1918)

Rud wrote not only detective and adventure stories but also Westerns, which were published in Ace-High Magazine, The Lariat Story Magazine, North-West Stories, Western Romances, Western Story Magazine, and other titles. The Internet Speculative Fiction database also has a list of his stories, including four for Weird Tales:

"The Devil's Heirloom" in Short Stories (Sept. 10, 1922)
"Ooze" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923; reprinted Jan. 1952; Summer 1983)
"A Square of Canvas" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1923)
"The Place of Hairy Death" in Weird Tales (Feb. 1934)
"Bellowing Bamboo" in Weird Tales(May 1934)
"The Molten Bullet" in Thrilling Wonder Stories (June 1937; reprinted in Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950)
"Rosebud Joe" in Golden Fleece (Oct. 1938)
"Bunyips in the Mulga" in Golden Fleece (Nov. 1938)

Rud had one letter in "The Eyrie" (Weird Tales, April 1923). I have found a story by him called "Supercharger" in the Chicago Tribune from June 12, 1932, as well. According to his obituary, Rud also contributed to the New York Daily News. His credits go on and on, including seven novels that I have found:

The Second Generation (1923)
Devil's Heirloom (1924)
The Last Grubstake (1924; published in paperback in the 1940s?)
Sentence of the Sixgun (1926)
House of the Damned (1934)
The Rose Bath Riddle (1934)
The Stuffed Men (1934)

He was associate editor of West (Jan.-Sept. 1926), the fourth editor of Adventure (Oct. 15, 1927-Feb. 1930), an editor of Detective Story Magazine (dates unknown), and an editor with Doubleday in New York City (1923-?). As Anson Piper, he wrote Westerns published near the end of his life and after his death. (His mother's maiden name was Piper; the Anson may have come from his father's Christian name: Anthony's son.) Here's a review of Black Creek Buckaroo (1941) in Kirkus Review:

Better than average Western, and a new name [i.e., a new author]. Ability to create character and situation, not too hackneyed. The setting is the Texas Panhandle, and there's plenty of gun and a wide range of cowhand vocabulary, before the whole story is told of how the top hand at Rafter T Ranch circumvented his boss, a bunch of rustlers, and a gang of crooks, and helped two girls hold on to their farm, and to get himself and his partner launched on their own venture.

Anson Piper's stories from The FictionMags Index:

"Black Creek Buckaroo" in Blue Ribbon Western (Feb. 1942)
"The Painted Ghost" in Double Action Western (July 1942)
"Bluebonnet Range" in Double Action Western (Nov. 1942)
"Platt of the Panhandle" in Western Action (Dec. 1942)
"The Miniature Arrows" in Western Action (Feb. 1943)
"Deadline Brands" in Complete Cowboy (Mar. 1943)
"Trouble Shooter" in Double Action Western (Mar. 1943)

And another hardbound Western:

Painted Ghost (1946)

According to more than one source on the Internet, Ray McGillivary was a pseudonym for Anthony Rud. There isn't any source given for that information, and I haven't found anything to support it. For instance, there is no Ray McGillvary in The Internet Speculative Fiction Database or in The FictionMags Index. However, there is a Ray McGillivray in both:

"The Forty Jars" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1923)
"Sinister Brand" in Real Western (Aug. 1942)

I think it safe to assume that the name Ray McGillivary is a mistake and that it has been perpetuated on the Internet as so many things are, mostly out of sheer laziness. So let's get rid of that bit of misinformation.

The upshot of all of this is that Anthony M. Rud was a prolific author of pulp fiction in several genres, with scores of stories published from 1918 to 1943. He helped get Weird Tales off on the right foot with his very serviceable and frequently reprinted story "Ooze." (It may also have been an influence on H.P. Lovecraft, though I don't have any direct evidence for that.) He got good reviews. (See the Kirkus Reviews item from above and the review of The Stuffed Men in the New York Times, Sept. 15, 1935, p. BR16.) He also edited several magazines. Despite all that, he doesn't seem to be very well remembered today. Maybe it was because he was so versatile. Maybe he wrote in genres that are seldom read today. Maybe it's because he died so young, at age forty-nine. Whatever the case, Anthony Rud I think is deserving of a second look. I have to say that I'm interested in his detective character Jigger Masters, and I'll be on the lookout for his stories.

Now on to another series and another murder.

Anthony Rud's and Ray McGillivray's Stories and Letters in Weird Tales

See the lists above.

Further Reading

Literary Luminaries of the Berkshires: From Herman Melville to Patricia Highsmith by Bernard A. Drew (Arcadia Publishing, 2015), pp. 95-96, here.

Aka Theodore LeBerthon, Ted Le Berthon, Ted LeBerthon

Author, Editor, Reporter, Columnist, Critic, Activist

Born January 9, 1892, San Francisco, California

Died January 31, 1960, Fresno, California

Here's a bit of gossip:

Franklin B. Pollock, wealthy 51-year-old Elmira, N. Y., glass manufacturer, was divorced from his second wife today and immediately wed No. 3, a pretty model from St. Louis. Wife No. 2, the former Helene Le Berthon of Beverly Hills, Calif., told newsmen she received a "pleasant settlement. It made me very happy." She wouldn't say how much it was, but friends estimated the settlement sum as "close to one million dollars.""Just say it will keep me in nylons for a good while," she added. Mrs. Pollock, 33, the daughter of Ted Le Berthon, Los Angeles newspaperman, was granted a divorce in a closed hearing before district judge A.J. Maestretti. The grounds were mental cruelty. Pollock, who married Miss Le Berthon in 1947 in New York City with Barbara (Bobo) Rockefeller standing by as maid of honor, flew to Reno from Elmira in a private plane early today. Following the divorce, he married Mrs. Virginia Lee Teaford, a twice-wed model. She was divorced recently in St. Louis from John K. Teaford, head of Teaford Industries, an international investment and trade firm with headquarters in Rio De Janeiro. Pollock is chairman of the board of the Thatcher Glass manufacturing company of Elmira. (Boldface added; from the Kansas City Times, October 21, 1954, p. 19.)

Described by the New York Times as "a self-made businessman,"Franklin B. Pollock (1903-1998) was president and chief executive of Thatcher Glass Manufacturing Company, among other accomplishments. In addition to being married to an actress, he had other ties to California and the movie business as a friend and political supporter of Ronald Reagan. Pollock had at least one more wife after No. 3. When he died at home in Holmby Hills, California, in 1998, he was survived by his wife Elsie, along with two children, seven grandchildren, and eight great grandchildren. (1)

John K. Teaford (1910-1987), who was on the losing end of the deal (presumably) in which he gave up Virginia Lee Teaford, the "pretty model from St. Louis," to Franklin B. Pollock, was also a businessman with ties to Hollywood. In the mid 1940s, he formed a partnership called Teaford, Danches & Company. That partnership dissolved after the war and after a little feuding among the partners. George Danches went on to work on the production side of a couple of films, Untamed Fury (1947) and Harpoon (1948). For his part, Teaford produced Accomplice (1946), a film-noir detective movie co-written by Frank Gruber (1904-1969), a prolific writer of pulp fiction, including stories for Weird Tales. As for Virginia Lee Teaford Pollock, she seems to have disappeared from the public record.

Born Jievute Paulekiute in western Pennsylvania, Barbara "Bobo" Sears Rockefeller (1916-2008) was a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants--her father was a coal miner and a railroad worker--who attained wealth and fame by marrying one of the richest men in America. First came her crowning as Miss Lithuania at age seventeen, then acting parts on stage, including Knights of Song (1938) and Tobacco Road (1939), and screen, including Bad Men of the Border (1945), Code of the Lawless (1945), and That Night with You (1945). In her stage-acting career, she called herself Eva Paul. (Jievute is the Lithuanian diminutive of Eva.) On screen, she was Barbara Sears, a surname that came by way of her marriage to wealthy socialite Richard Sears, Jr., whom she had met in Boston while performing in Tobacco Road.

Barbara Paul Sears divorced her husband in 1947. By then she had already met husband No. 2, Winthrop Rockefeller (1912-1973). That propitious event happened in 1946. He gave her a big rock of a ring. (2) She responded by marrying him on St. Valentine's Day 1948 in Palm Beach. Less than two years later, they were separated. They finally divorced in 1954. She got custody of their son, a 10,000 square-foot apartment in New York, and another apartment in Paris. He got the governorship of Arkansas (1967-1971). His term and his second marriage, to previously thrice-married socialite Jeanette Edris, came to an end in the same year. He died in 1973 of cancer. Rockefeller's first wife, Barbara the Lithuanian beauty queen, never remarried and died at age ninety-one in Little Rock, Arkansas. (3)

Helene Le Berthon (1918-1992), Mrs. Pollock No. 2 and according to gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, "Bobo Rockefeller's close chum," was, like her friend, an actress. Her first big role, if you can call it that, came in the movie Religious Racketeers, released in 1938. She also appeared on stage, as Helene or Helena Le Berthon, in The Millard Show (revue, 1936) Soliloquy (1938), Tobacco Road (1939), Blossom Time (1943), The Student Prince (1943), Let's Face It (1944), Questionable Ladies (1944), and A Lady Says Yes (1945). Only two years separated her in age from Eva Paul, aka Barbara Rockefeller. The two young actresses may very well have met while performing in the cast of Tobacco Road in 1939, when Bobo was about twenty-three and Helene was about twenty-one. (4) In any event, like the bit of gossip opening this article says, Bobo was maid of honor for her close chum when Helene Le Berthon married Franklin B. Pollock on February 23, 1947, evidently at the Hampshire House in Boston. (5) Upon her divorce, she got close to a million dollars from the ex-hubby. Barbara Rockefeller bested her friend by four or five million. They were both divorced in the same year.

A few years after her divorce, Helene Le Berthon appeared on the small screen, on episodes of The Betty Hutton Show (1960) and The Chevy Mystery Show (1960). Those may have been her last acting credits. They came in the year that her father died after a long life writing for movies, newspapers, and magazines, including Weird Tales. His name was Theodore Le Berthon, and as a devout Catholic, he could not have thought very much of all that divorcing and remarrying. But then it ran in the family.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) For an obituary, see "Franklin B. Pollock, Businessman, 95,"New York Times, July 3, 1998.

(2) I'll avoid the obvious pun by not calling him a "rock-a-fella."

(3) For an obituary of her, see "Barbara Sears Rockefeller, Actress With a Famous Divorce Settlement, Dies at 91" by Margalit Fox, New York Times, May 21, 2008.

(4) See the Reading Times, October 28, 1939, p. 9, here. Look for Helene Le Berthon and Eva Paul in the cast of Tobacco Road.

(5) The place is according to a contemporary item in the New York Times, "Helene LeBerthon Wed; Bride of Franklin B. Pollock In Hampshire Hojjse [sic] Nuptials"here. The headline has obviously been scanned by a computer program, which seems to have read the u as a jj.The article is a subscription article, and I don't have a subscription, so I can't say for sure what it says.

A set of lobby cards for Accomplice, a movie from 1946 starring Richard Arlen, co-written by Frank Gruber, and produced by John K. Teaford.

Barbara "Bobo" Rockefeller on the cover of Life magazine, March 15, 1954.

And the connection between them, actress Helene Le Berthon (second from left). All together, they are: Ralph Thomas (singing coach) with (left to right) Elaine Dennis, Helene Le Berthon, Colleen Ward, Marilyn Knowlden, Muriel Goodspeed, and Eleanor Prentiss, from 1936. Muriel Goodspeed played in the 1936 serial Flash Gordon.

Martha Morgan: You newspapermen are so cynical about everything that doesn’t come out of your own typewriters.

That was actress Helene Le Berthon's first line in the movie Religious Racketeers (1938). There's some irony in it, considering that Helene's father was a lifelong newspaperman and that her grandfatherwas a newspaper reporter as well as an owner and publisher of news journals and other publications. Helene seems to have worked in the newspaper business as well, probably on the same paper as her father. According to the website of the American Film Institute (AFI):

A news item during production [of the 1937 picture A Million to One] noted that Helen LeBerthon [sic] of the [Los Angeles] Daily News editorial staff was cast in the picture, however, her participation in the completed film has not been confirmed. (Link here.)

She may very well have gotten the role because of her father's connections, especially in the movie business. It proved to be her only credited movie role, at least according to The Internet Movie Database. The film, called an "exploitation feature" by The Film Daily, was short and soon forgotten. (More on that later.) Today it resides in the public domain. Helene Le Berthon has been largely forgotten as well, although she had a couple of TV parts in 1960. Despite all that, she had something few actors or actresses then or now can match: her birth, which took place on February 19, 1918,was announced in the show business paper Variety.

Helene Le Berthon was the only child of Theodore M. and Frances Elizabeth (Hawley) Le Berthon, who were married in Los Angeles on April 4, 1917, the year before she was born. Ted Le Berthon, then in his mid twenties, was already making his living as a writer. Now, nearly a century later, it's not very difficult to put together some facts on his life and career. Mrs. Le Berthon, on the other hand, is almost lost except for her peripheral involvement in the Kid McCoy scandal of 1920. (1) She was born on September 28, 1897, to Charles O. and Anne or Anna M. Hawley, married at age nineteen, and a mother at twenty. In the 1930 census, Frances E. Le Berthon was living with her parents in Los Angeles and had her daughter with her. Her husband was nowhere in sight. Ordinarily that might not mean very much. It was, after all, the first year of the Great Depression. Families of that time often lived apart. Further facts in the lives of the Le Berthon family, however, suggest a split. Any separation between Theodore Le Berthon and his wife became permanent with his death on January 31, 1960, in Fresno, California. Frances E. Hawley Le Berthon died on May 9, 1969, also in Fresno.

So I have begun with Theodore Le Berthon's death. Let me go back to his birth. Get ready for more gossip and scandal.

To be continued . . .

Note
(1) She was friends with the Kid's eighth wife, dancer and actress Carmen Browder, aka Dagmar Dahlgren or Dalgren, whom he tried to rape two weeks after they were married. For her part, Carmen was married at least four or five times. Kid McCoy (1872-1940) was her second husband. Her dates are uncertain. Wikipedia and The Internet Movie Database say 1880-1951. A source on Rootsweb says 1901-1967. I'm inclined to believe the latter over the former. One of the themes from Part One of the story of Theodore Le Berthon is multiple marriages and divorce. The theme continues today. There will be more of it in Part Three.

Helene Le Berthon and Arthur Gardner in the opening scene in Religious Racketeers (1938). She was all of twenty years old.

Theodore M. Le Berthon was born to John Leopold Le Berthon and Rose Marguerite (Vollmer) Le Berthon on January 9, 1892, in San Francisco, California. (1, 2) He was the oldest of their three children. The middle child, Anne Marguerite Le Berthon, was born on October 20, 1893, the youngest, Rose C. Le Berthon, on December 19, 1896. Whether they lived together as a happy family or not, they made a family affair of marryingduring a three- or four-year period in the 1910s. Every single one of them.Rather than take their marriages chronologically, I'll start from the top and work my way down. I'll begin with a divorce.

On January 29, 1910, Rose M. Le Berthon filed for divorce against John Le Berthon in Los Angeles superior court. That cleared the way for a series of marriages:

In 1914, John Leopold Le Berthon (July 17, 1868-Feb. 26, 1952), the patriarch of the Le Berthon family, married Josephine L. Morris. She was born either in 1894 or on November 21, 1899. In either case, she was younger than Le Berthon's children, or at least two of them. If 1899 was the year, then Josephine was only fifteen when she became a bride. John and Josephine Le Berthon had a daughter named Adeline (1921-1946), who died tragically young. Josephine L. Morris Le Berthon died in either 1942 or on September 26 or 29, 1989, more likely in 1989. She and her husband seem to have lived a life full of squabbles, crusades, schemes, suits, and legal problems. More on that in Part Four.

On October 6, 1917, Rose Marguerite (Vollmer) Le Berthon (Nov. 21,1869-Nov. 29, 1951) married Nickodemus [sic] Elias. It was just one of her eight marriages. The last was to a man named Gustaf Lucas, and that was the surname under which she was interred. See Find A Grave, here, for that.

On April 4, 1917, in Los Angeles, Theodore M. Le Berthon married Frances Elizabeth Hawley. Helene Le Berthon, born on February 19, 1918, was their only child. She attended Blessed Sacrament School and Hollywood High School, then appeared on stage and in at least one movie. She married Franklin B. Pollock on February 23, 1947, evidently at the Hampshire House in Boston. They divorced on October 21, 1954. Helene died in Los Angeles, California, on December 28, 1992. I don't know whether she married again or had any children.

On June 26, 1915, in Los Angeles, Anne Marguerite Le Berthon (Oct. 20, 1893-Nov. 21, 1982), married Otto H. Wyckoff (1893-Oct. 12, 1920). They had a son, Robert Hartford Wyckoff (Mar. 3, 1917-Nov. 8, 2014). At some point, Otto H. Wyckoff served in the U.S. Army. He died in 1920. Anne remarried. At her mother's death, she was Anne Hyskell. Her husband, Dean Hyskell, was an advertising executive, photographer, and the editor of National Theatres magazine.

On July 25, 1914, in Los Angeles, Rose C. Le Berthonmarried Harold E. Herndon. They may or may not have had children. She later married Joseph Peluso and at her mother's death called herself Catherine Peluso.

The Le Berthon family would seem to have faded into obscurity. However, there are living descendants of John L. and Rose C. Le Berthon. In addition, just recently--incredibly--Le Berthon's name was brought up in a legal action in Los Angeles. Their granddaughter's only movie is in the public domain and available on YouTube. And Ted Le Berthon's lone story for Weird Tales has been reprinted several times, most recently on the Internet. Like William Faulkner says, the past is not even past.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) These and most of the following facts on the Le Berthon family are from secondary sources on the Internet and could use corroboration from primary sources.
(2) Theodore Le Berthon's middle name may have been Morican, and he may have been the grandson of another man named Theodore M. Le Berthon (1832-1906), who is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Courageous Crusading Journalist

Native of San Francisco

That is the inscription (in part) on John L. Le Berthon's headstone. Although he was a native of San Francisco, Le Berthon was buried at School Street Cemetery in East Boothbay, Maine, about as far from his native city as you can get and still be in the continental United States. Our lives are full of mysteries. The reason for Le Berthon's burial in Maine seems to be one of them. I am reminded of Stephen King's book The Colorado Kid, which ends without an explanation as to why the dead man came to Maine.

Like his headstone says, Le Berthon was a crusading journalist. He began his career in 1883. In the early part of the twentieth century, he worked in publicity and publishedspecial issues of daily papers and magazines, souvenir programs, and booklets on subjects of local interest. One was a publication on the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Another was on architecture in Los Angeles. If Theodore Morican Le Berthon (1833-1906) was his father, then the earthquake and his father's death came in the same year (though not at the same time). In 1907, J.L. Le Berthon was general manager of The Grizzly Bear, a periodical published out of San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was also a reporter for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin at some point.

In July 1935, Le Berthon acquired The WaspNews-Letter, which became, under his and his wife's joint ownership, the News Letter and Wasp. Founded in San Francisco in 1876, The Wasp was a well-known and long-running journal. The Newsletter was older still, having started in 1856. To some it was and is also notorious, at least in its early days, especially for its treatment of Chinese immigrants. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)served as editor of The Wasp from 1881 to 1885. His Devil's Dictionary was drawn from its pages.

John L. Le Berthon, who ran the News Letter and Wasp until it ceased publication on May 9, 1941, was, like Bierce, something of a gadfly. (1) Not long after acquiring the paper, he began raging against the composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965), who was jailed on a morals charge in 1936. In the late 1930s, Le Berthon launched attacks on and advocated the deportation of labor leader Harry Bridges. That cost the News Letter and Wasp when someone threw rocks through the front windows of its offices in January 1937. In early 1939, Le Berthon threatened to attack NBC for refusing "to sell him airtime during the political time period." A couple of months later, on April 8, 1939, he was fined $500 and sentenced to five days in jail on three counts of criminal libel. (I don't know who the offended party was.) Le Berthon may not have served his full sentence, as he had an attack in jail upon turning himself in.

Le Berthon also dealt in real estate. There is evidence that he lived in New York City and had holdings in New Jersey. In Los Angeles today, there is a street called Le Berthon Street. I don't know that it was named for him or for anyone else in his family, but about two or three miles west of there is a parcel of land once owned by the Annette Kellerman Rancho Realty Corporation, incorporated in 1925, and the Kellerman Ranch Club. That parcel and two others were recently condemned by the City of Los Angeles. According to a public hearing dated August 26, 2014, the intent of the corporation is assumed to have been "to promote properties using the name of the then popular Australian World Champion swimmer and film star Annette Kellerman." The document adds, "Nowhere in Ms. Kellerman's biography can be found mention of any affiliation with a club or real estate development in California." (2, 3)

The City of Los Angeles condemned the property after a fruitless search for any employees of the corporation or the heirs or assigns of its members. As it turns out, those members were John L. Le Berthon, president; Josephine L. Le Berthon, secretary; and a T.M. Le Berthon, whom the investigator in the case was unable to identify. He may not have looked hard enough: John L. Le Berthon's only son had those initials, lived in Los Angeles in the 1920s, and had connections to the movie business. (The investigator probably didn't have the online resources that are available now, even though that was only a year and a half ago.) Moreover, an article in the Los Angeles Times from 1925 clearly shows Ted Le Berthon's involvement and leading role in the Kellerman club scheme. (4)

Although her autobiography doesn't mention the proposed club, Annette Kellerman was aware of its existence and may have participated in its establishment. In 1925, she filed suit against the Annette Kellerman Country Club for wrongful use of her name, fraud, and other offenses. Ted Le Berthon defended the club against her accusations, asserting that "Miss Kellerman and her husband, James R. Sullivan, broke off with the defendants [the Le Berthons and their partners] when money did not flow to her as fast as she wished it." Le Berthon also got in digs against Sullivan, "whom he described as 'a Semitic person and not an Irishman as the name might indicate'," and against the mermaid queen herself, saying that "Miss Kellerman's fame as a beauty of youthful appearance was an exaggeration." (5)

I have nothing more on the case, but the fact that the property was still owned by the Annette Kellerman Rancho Realty Corporation and the Kellerman Ranch Club ninety years later and long after the deaths of all the people involved suggests to me that the Le Berthon family met with some success in the suit. In any event, long before his father died on February 26, 1952, Ted Le Berthon seems to have been a schemer, a crusader, and an activist. You might call him a chip off the old block.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) For links to articles about the announcement of the journal's end, click here and h ere. the second article mentions not only Ambrose Bierce but also Frank Norris (1870-1902).

(2) Annette Kellerman (1886-1975) was a swimmer, performer, actress, and author. She was the first woman to wear a one-piece bathing suit, the first to appear fully nude in a movie (in A Daughter of the Gods, Fox, 1916), and the first on film to wear what Wikipedia calls "a swimmable mermaid costume." All that swimming must have done her some good: she lived to be eighty-nine years old.

(3) It is incredible to me that a piece of property purchased ninety years ago and no longer held by any living person or existing entity should still sit on the books. Who paid the taxes in that time? Why did not a real estate developer look into acquiring the property long before it was finally condemned by the city? The questions could go on. Anyway, I have said it before and I'll say it again: sometimes the world is essentially weird.
(4) "Mermaid Queen Seeks Damages,"Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1925, p. A1+.
(5) The quotes and quotes within quotes are from that same article.

The Wasp, May 26, 1882, then under the editorship of Ambrose Bierce. The cover, by the journal's regular cartoonist, George Frederick Keller (1846-?), shows "San Francisco's Three Graces": Malarium, Small-Pox, and Leprosy. Note that Leprosy is carrying a cloth reading "Chinatown." This is the first of three weird images from The Wasp shown here. I have chosen them partly because they are weird, but more because they show how weird imagery is used in popular culture and what its use could mean.

This cartoon, from 1882, shows as monsters those on the other end of the scale, "The Vampires[,] or the Landlords of San Francisco." The artist was once again Keller.

If you want to dehumanize another person and from there attack him, one thing you can do is to represent him as a monster or a demon. The unnamed cartoonist on this cover drawing from November 14, 1885, has done just that with "The Chinese," whom he calls, "Many Handed but Soulless." This was still a few years before the term "Yellow Peril" was invented (by Kaiser Wilhelm II of all people), but the image of East Asians as demons was an effective bit of propaganda and served well for many decades. The cover of The Wasp shown here isn't very much different from . . .

This one of Weird Tales from forty-four years later. The difference is that the villain here is a type and not overtly insulting, offensive, dehumanizing, or propagandistic. The artist was C.C. Senf. (Like Keller and the Kaiser, Senf was a native of Germany.)

Finally, a cover of the News Letter and Wasp from John L. Le Berthon's years as owner, from November 24 (?), 1939.

As a journalist, activist, and contributor to Catholic magazines, Theodore Le Berthon shared his father's crusading ways. He was educated in the Catholic schools of Los Angeles. At the time of his marriage in Los Angeles in 1917, he was editor of the Orange (California) Daily Star. As of 1919, he worked at the Strand Theater in San Francisco, which was then only two years old and part of Sid Grauman's chain of theaters. (The Strand Theater reopened in 2015 after years of disuse.) In an article from 1920, Le Berthon was described as a former newspaperman with the San Francisco Post and the Los Angeles Evening Herald, as an employee of the publicity office of Famous Players-Lasky, and after that in the publicity office for Grauman's theaters. The same article suggests that he had begun his career with the Imperial Theatre in San Francisco, which opened in 1912 and was sold by Grauman's in 1919.

Bruno David Ussher, the author of that 1920 article in Pacific Coast Musical Review, wrote: "[Ted Le Berthon] is regarded as one of the most able men among his profession." Despite that or maybe because of it, he resigned his position with Grauman's theaters in September 1920 in support of musical conductor Arthur Kay, who stepped down because of artistic differences with Sid Grauman. Le Berthon was in good company: organist Jesse Crawford resigned with him, also in support of Kay. (1, 2)

After leaving the employ of Sid Grauman, Ted Le Berthon did publicity work for King Vidor and the Balaban & Katz theaters. In about 1921-1922, he served as editor of The Photodramatist. According to The Internet Movie Database, he wrote the titles for Arizona Wildcat (1927) starring Tom Mix. His connections to the movie business landed him interviews with Lupe Velez, Evelyn Brent, Charlie Chaplin, and other movie stars. His only story for Weird Tales, "Demons of the Film Colony" (Oct. 1932), came from his witnessingthe first meeting between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi at Universal City in March 1932. "For ten years," Le Berthon wrote in his introduction to the tale, "I have been writing about the activities of the motion picture colony for what are known as the 'fan' magazines.""Demons of the Film Colony" reads like a story from a movie fan magazine except for the macabre twist at the end. That twist seemed specially made for the Weird Tales crowd.

I wonder now whether Theodore Le Berthon and Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) knew or were acquainted with each other. Born in the same city four years apart, they were both journalists and publicity men. Both were also part of the cultural scene in San Francisco, even if Wright had vacated his home state in about 1920. As editor of Weird Tales, Wright seems to have recruited writers from California, perhaps in two groups, a San Francisco group and a Los Angeles group. Le Berthon called both cities home. In any event, you can read "Demons of the Film Colony," see photographs of the meeting between Karloff and Lugosi, and read the story behind the story at Vampire Over London: The Bela Lugosi Blog by Andy Brooks, April 7, 2015, here. Le Berthon's story has been reprinted several times since its initial publication in Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Composer, conductor, and musical director Arthur Kay (1881-1969) went on to work in movies, including on Westerns, adventure films, and at least two titles based on comic strips, Tailspin Tommy (1934) and Dick Tracy (1937). Jesse Crawford (1895-1962), the "Poet of the Organ," is more well remembered. He played at the Chicago World's Fair in 1934, the same venue where Barbara Rockefeller was crowned Miss Lithuania. In later years, he made a number of records which you can sometimes still find at the secondhand store.

(2) You can read the full story in "Arthur Key Resigns from Grauman's in Los Angeles" by Bruno David Ussher, Pacific Coast Musical Review, Sept. 25, 1920, p. 4, here.

"Demons of the Film Colony" by Theodore Le Berthon was reprinted in The Frankenscience Monster, edited by Forrest J Ackerman (Ace, 1969). The cover art is signed, but it's too small for me to read.

It appeared again in The Frankenstein Omnibus, edited by Peter Haining and published in 1994.

And previously in The Frankenstein File (1977), also from Haining. I don't know who created the cover art. Being an artist, I'm biased, but I like an art cover more than a photo cover.

Theodore Le Berthon seems to have been a full-time writer, journalist, and/or publicity man all of his working life. I have found lots of credits for him. Some have dates attached to them. Some don't. I'll list them by bullets. These are in rough chronological order.

Manager?, Imperial Theatre, San Francisco
Editor, Orange (California) Daily Star (as of 1917)
Reporter, San Francisco Post and Los Angeles Evening Herald (prior to 1920)
Publicity, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (ca. 1917-1919) (1)
Publicity, (Sid Grauman's) Strand Theater, San Francisco (ca. 1919)
Publicity, (Sid Grauman's) Million Dollar Theatre, Los Angeles (to Sept. 1920)
Publicity?, King Vidor (1920); Balaban & Katz theaters (1920s)
Editor, The Photodramatist (June 1921-ca. 1922)
Columnist, "Screen Writers Forum," Camera (ca. 1921-1922)
Police reporter (as of 1923)
Columnist, "Merry-Go-Round,"Los Angeles Evening Herald (1920s)
Title writer, Arizona Wildcat, movie starring Tom Mix (1927)
Reporter on New York, Brooklyn, and Chicago dailies (dates unknown)
Reporter, managing editor, Los Angeles Record (as of 1930)
Reporter, columnist, "Night Court,"Los Angeles Daily and/or Evening News (columnist, 1936, 1937, or 1938 to Sept. 1943)
Contributor, America, Motion Picture, possibly other movie fan magazines (1920s on)
Columnist, "White Man's Views," Pittsburgh Courier (1940s)
Contributing editor, Negro Digest (1940s?)
Received the first annual Blessed Martin DePorres Award for his interracial work (1944)

Ted Le Berthon was a Catholic, and he wrote for Catholic publications. His credits there:

Association with The Catholic Worker (1940s?)
Assistant editor, The Catholic Digest (1940s)
Columnist and staff writer, The Tidings of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles (dates unknown)
Contributor, Catholic Mind, The Marianist, The Sign, and Commonweal, including for Commonweal:
"The Inner Forum," Aug. 7, 1942
"The Lights Went Out," May 17, 1946
"At the Prevailing Rate," Nov. 1, 1957
"The Bare Minimum," Mar. 14, 1958
"Trouble in California," June 20, 1958
"Vindication for the Nisei," Jan. 16, 1959
"Disappearing Dailies," Nov. 6, 1959

He was also an author of short stories, including:

"Demons of the Film Colony,"Weird Tales, Oct. 1932
"I Took Thee, Constance,"Story, May-June 1946; reprinted in Many-Colored Fleece, an anthology of Catholic fiction edited by Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951)
"The Racist,"The Sign, Apr. 1949

In The American Catholic Who's Who, 1960 and 1961 (p. 260), Le Berthon was listed as being on the editorial staff of the Central California [or Fresno?] Register and residing at 3309 Grant Avenue, Fresno. He died of a heart attack in Fresno on January 31, 1960. So far in this series, Le Berthon has died at least three times. I think it will happen once more before I reach the end.

To be continued . . .

Note
(1) Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, formed in 1916, eventually became Paramount Pictures. Today, Paramount is owned by Viacom, also the owners of the Weird Tales property.

In the 1910s, Ted Le Berthon worked in publicity for Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. (I think it was sometimes called "exploitation" in those days.) One of the stars of that studio was Wanda Hawley. Here she is being levitated by Harry Houdini. The image is from a blog called Harry Houdini Circumstantial Evidence, by Joe, and dated July 27, 2014. Two recent entries (Jan. 10 & 17, 2016) are about Houdini, H.P. Lovecraft, C.M. Eddy, Jr., and Sonia Greene. You might want to have a look.

So here is an actress named Wanda Hawley. Ted Le Berthon's wife was also named Hawley, and he was involved in the movie business. Was there a connection between them? I was really hoping I would find something, but . . .

Wanda Hawley was born Selma Wanda Pittack on July 30, 1895, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1916, she married Allen Burton Hawley (1895-Sept. 1925). She made her debut the following year with the Fox Film Corporation, but she went on to work with Famous Players-Lasky, King Vidor, Cecil B. DeMille, and other moviemakers. Ted Le Berthon worked in publicity for Famous Players-Lasky and King Vidor. It seems likely to me that he knew her. But was she related by marriage to his wife? In other words, were Frances Elizabeth Hawley Le Berthon and Allen Burton Hawley related? I don't have access to all the resources I might need to answer that question, but in my research, I haven't found anything to suggest a connection between them. In any event, Wanda Hawley divorced her husband in 1923 (not 1922 as sources on the Internet indicate). Her career pretty well ended with the first talkies, and she died on March 18, 1963, in Los Angeles. Look for her on Find A Grave, here.

By the way, Houdini will show again before this series is finished.

Several years ago Ted Le Berthon resigned his post as assistant editor of the Catholic Digest in order to devote more time to creative writing. . . . As general assignment reporter on New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Los Angeles newspapers, he developed as a writer through the discipline of journalism. Seeing the white man's injustice to Negroes as one of the gravest national problems, he has used his pen in various ways to help solve the race problem. His efforts in this direction include his work as contributing editor to the Negro Digest, his column, "White Man's Views" for The Pittsburgh Courier, the nation's leading Negro weekly newspaper, and his short story The Racist, recently published in The Sign.

--from the introduction to "I Took Thee, Constance" by Theodore Le Berthon
in Many-Colored Fleece edited by Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B.

Ted Le Berthon worked for the Los Angeles Daily News (or Evening News) during the 1930s. In the latter part of the decade, in about 1936-1938, he began a column called "Night Court." Initially he wrote about what went on at night at the Lincoln Heights Jail and Court. Soon he was writing--by some indications obsessively--about race, religion, poverty, discrimination, and other social issues. An article in the California Eagle, a black newspaper, from January 20, 1938, tells of a presentation he made to a women's club. Note that even by early 1938, his column was considered "widely-read" and "popular."

Ted Le Berthon, widely-read columnist and author of the popular Evening News feature, "Night Court," also spoke [to the club]. Mr. Le Berthon spoke against racial discrimination and dwelt largely on the theme of equality of all, because God created all. He advanced the belief that eventually discrimination as well as racial differences would disappear as an inevitable result of fusion of the races.

In an interview called "Paste Pots, Booze, Liberalism and BB-Guns: A Talk with L.A. Newspaper Historian Rob Wagner," the author Rob Leicester Wagner had more to say about Le Berthon:

One interesting character they [the Los Angeles Daily News] had was named Ted LeBerthon, and he's in the book [Red Ink, White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers, 1920-1962 by Rob Leicester Wagner (2000)]. He was what you'd call today the minority affairs reporter. His job was to hang around the Lincoln Heights Jail and Lincoln Heights Court---night court, back then---and just record the folks that came in and out of jail and court. Inevitably, there were a lot of blacks and latinos that went through there, and he started writing about their stories. He was largely responsible, in the late '30s, for writing about blacks and latinos, and their issues. And he had his personal phonograph record player that he'd haul from his apartment, over to the newsroom, and put up on the windowsill, and play black jazz all night. There were a lot of staffers who loved it, and a lot who hated it. After a while, he started writing more about religion issues, and I don't know if he became mentally ill or unbalanced or what, but he pretty much became a religious fanatic, and that's all he wrote. According to one staffer I talked to, he began to see the face of Jesus Christ in every homeless man that ever walked in looking for a handout, and they eventually had to let him go. But for a brief, shining moment for a five year period, he was the only man in town who took the time to write about the downtrodden and the folks that live on the fringes. (1)

In his more recent book, The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (UNM Press, 2006), Kevin Allen Leonard looked more deeply into the controversy involving Ted Le Berthon, race, religion, and his firing from the Los Angeles Daily News. Mr. Leonard related the story especially to the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943. Le Berthon was sympathetic to the wearers of zoot suits, seeing them as poor and underprivileged young men who "resented being treated as 'lower classes'." (2)

Three months after the Zoot Suit Riots, in late September 1943, Berthon was fired from the Los Angeles Daily News. The aforementioned California Eagle felt that Le Berthon was dismissed "because of 'too-frequent' mention of discrimination against Negro people in his writing." (3) Le Berthon provided his own explanation, writing that he had been let go "on the grounds that I had failed to heed repeated warnings against over-emphasizing my religious views and the inter-racial philosophy flowing from them." (4) A quote and a reference in Wikipedia suggest that Le Berthon's column of September 14, 1943, pleading for someone to rent or sell a home to black clarinetist Jimmie Noone, was the last straw. (5) However it happened, in September 1943, because of his writing on race and other controversial topics, Ted Le Berthon found himself out of a job.

I don't know exactly what happened after that or in what order. It seems that Le Berthon lost his anchor when he lost his job with the Daily News. He wrote a column called "The White Man's Views" for the Pittsburgh Courier in the 1940s. With Dan Marshall, his old college roommate, he founded the Catholic Interracial Council of Los Angeles. (6) Le Berthon was also involved in the Catholic Worker Movement and its newspaper, The Catholic Worker. And while living in St. Paul, Minnesota, and working as associate editor of The Catholic Digest, he shared a room with the Catholic writer James Farl Powers (1917-1999). In 1944, Le Berthon received the first annual Blessed Martin de Porres Award for his work in interracial relations. Then in 1947, while he was living in Elmira, New York, a deeper crisis came into his life.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) You can read the full interview at:

http://www.riprense.com/Dailynewspagewagner.htm.

(2) Quoted in Leonard, p. 162.
(3) Quoted in Leonard, p. 194.
(4) Quoted in Leonard, p. 195.
(5) The reference: LeBerthon, Ted, "White Man’s Views: A Tribute to Jimmie Noone; Recalls Hardships Suffered by Celebrated Musician," from the Pittsburgh Courier, May 6, 1944.
(6) I don't know where Le Berthon went to college. Their founding of the Catholic Interracial Council of Los Angeles may have come before Le Berthon's firing. (I don't have a date.)

A zoot-suiter in happier times.

On December 9, 1925, in "The Merry-Go-Round," his column for the Los Angeles Evening Herald, Ted Le Berthon wrote about a strange young man whose future would prove him to be not just strange but monstrous. The title of that particular column was "Clouded Past of a Poet." Its subject, described as "tall, olive-skinned, with wavy black hair and a strong, bold nose," was George Hodel. (1)

Born on October 10, 1907, in Los Angeles, George Hill Hodel, Jr., was a child prodigy. His IQ tested at 186. At age nine, he played solo piano concerts at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Hodel graduated from South Pasadena High School at fourteen and entered the California Institute of Technology to study chemical engineering. There his precociousness was expressed in a different way when he had an affair with and impregnated the wife of a faculty member. Things were kept quiet, but Hodel was forced out of the university. He faked his age, got a chauffeur's license, and started driving a cab at night. He also became a police reporter for the Los Angeles Record. "He was there to record the lurid details as pimps, prostitutes, and johns . . . were hauled off," wrote his biographer. "The precocious kid from Pasadena was now L.A.'s youngest crime reporter, rubbing shoulders with hoods, murderers, and corrupt officials." (2) He was then sixteen years old, making the year 1923 or 1924.

As of 1923, Ted Le Berthon was also a police reporter, though I don't know for which paper in Los Angeles. Later, as a devout Catholic, he seems to have been drawn to the low life because of his concern for his fellow man. Nodel's motivations were likely far different, as events would prove. He might easily have been described as an aesthete and a decadent. "It's not George's gloom, his preference for Huysmanns [sic], De Gourmant, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Hecht that pains us," wrote Le Berthon from the point of view of Hodel's friends, "but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!" (3, 4)

George drowned himself at times in an ocean of deep dreams [Le Berthon wrote]. Only part of him seemed present. He would muse, standing before one in a black, flowered dressing gown lined with scarlet silk, oblivious to one's presence. Suddenly, though, his eyes would flare up like signal lights and he would say, "The formless fastidiousness of perfumes in a seventeenth century boudoir is comparable to my mind in the presence of twilight." (5)

Based on those passages, not only aesthete and decadent, but also the phrase adolescent poseur might describe Hodel. That adolescence, along with the preference for fantastic and decadent authors, the name dropping, the evocation of the seventeenth-century past, and the florid language remind me of Lovecraft. Hodel even published his own avant-garde literary magazine called Fantasia. But again, his life went down a different path than that of Lovecraft.

At twenty, George Hodel became a radio host for Southern California Gas Company's Music Hour, a program of classical music, and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study pre-medicine. From there it was on to the University of California, San Francisco, for medical school. Hodel also wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle called "Abroad in San Francisco." I don't know of any further contact between Ted Le Berthon and George Hodel after 1925. Maybe Le Berthon's father, John L. Le Berthon, crossed paths with the young doctor, writer, and music aficionado in San Francisco.

After working as a physician in New Mexico, Hodel returned to Los Angeles in the early 1940s. Still drawn to bohemianism and the avant-garde side of life, he was friends with Man Ray (1890-1976), Henry Miller (1891-1980), Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), and Fred Sexton (1907-1995, the creator of the Maltese Falcon statuette). In the early 1940s, Hodel married John Huston's first wife. (He had been friends with Huston in the 1920s). In all, Hodel had eleven children by five women. In 1949, one of Hodel's children, Tamar, accused him of incest. The case went to trial, but Hodel was acquitted. In 1950, he left the country for the Philippines. He returned to San Francisco forty years later and died in that city in May 1999 at age ninety-one. After his death, one of his sons, Steve Hodel, began looking into his life.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Quoted in Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel by Steve Hodel and Ralph Pezzullo (Penguin, 2009), Online, Ch. 1 (unpaginated).

(2) Hodel and Pezzullo, Ch. 1.
(3) Quoted in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder: The True Story by Steve Hodel (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), Online, "The Voice" (unpaginated).

(4) Poe (1809-1849), Baudelaire (1821-1867), and Verlaine (1844-1896) were published posthumously in Weird Tales. The others were not published at all in the magazine. However, I have written about Ben Hecht (1894-1964) and, in my article about him, a little of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). Remy de Gourmant (1858-1915) was an associate of Huysmans and a French Symbolist poet. Click on their names in the main body for links. Coincidentally, 1923, the year in which George Hodel got his start as a police reporter, thereby descending physically into the low life (I suspect he had already begun a personal, spiritual, and moral descent by then), was also the year in which Weird Tales began. Despite the bustling Jazz Age in America, the 1920s were a time of decadence in Western civilization. The advent of Weird Tales was just one example of that. The prominence of the psychopathic killer was another. Stay tuned for more.

(5) Quoted in Hodel and Pezzullo, Ch. 1.

George Hill Hodel, Jr., South Pasadena High School Class of 1923, and the subject of "Clouded Past of Poet," a column by Ted Le Berthon from 1925.

On January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger of Leimert Park, Los Angeles, was on an errand with her three-year-old daughter when she saw, lying in a vacant lot, what she thought to be a department store manikin. A closer look revealed the truth. Mrs. Bersinger rushed from the scene to phone the police. They arrived shortly thereafter to find what she had found, a woman's body, neatly cut in two at the waist. That was the beginning of the infamous Black Dahlia murder case.

The so-called Black Dahlia was Elizabeth Short (1924-1947), a young woman from Massachusetts who had arrived in California at nineteen, and who, after having bounced around for a while, was murdered at age twenty-two in a yet unknown place. Her killer, also unknown, bound her, beat her, and cut her face and body. He further mutilated her body, drained it of blood, washed it, and carefully arranged its severed parts in the vacant lot where Mrs. Bersinger found it the next morning. The police questioned hundreds of people, suspected scores, and finally narrowed their list of suspects to about two dozen. About a third of those suspects were physicians or surgeons. One was Dr. George Hill Hodel, Jr., about whom Ted Le Berthon had written in 1925.

The murder of Elizabeth Short remains an open case, despite nearly seven decades of investigation by police, journalists, authors, and amateur detectives. After George Hodel's death in 1999, his son, Steve Hodel, began investigating the Black Dahlia murder. He is convinced that his father was the killer and has presented his investigations in Black Dahlia Avenger (2006), Black Dahlia Avenger II (2014), Most Evil (with Ralph Pezzullo, 2009), and Most Evil II (2015). (1) With his books, Mr. Hodel has convinced others as well, although there are dissenting opinions, especially about his later allegations.

Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss (2006) "presents the theory that Elizabeth Short's murder may have been informed by surrealist art, and that the killer was familiar with surrealist art and ideas." They, too, suppose that Hodel was the murderer, although they don't make an outright accusation. Their hypothesis is compelling, especially in view of images like those shown below. (2) There have been other books and theories as well. Some agree on the killer's identity. Others are more eccentric.

The idea that George Hodel was a murderer fits with themes I have written about on this blog:

First, the intellectual, very often a writer, artist, or philosopher, who sets himself above the world and all the people in it; who throws off traditional constraints, particularly moral constraints, and does or advocates to be done whatever he wills. Very often, that intellectual is strictly a man of words or ideas. He doesn't take any action, in which case he is sometimes seen as a comic figure or buffoon, as Hodel looked in Le Berthon's profile of 1925. When he does take action, however, he is very often deadly.

Second, and related to the first, a special kind of depravity that emanates especially from the middle class, from individuals with ambitions not so much to greatness as to be seen or recognized by the rest of humanity for their greatness; to be considered great thinkers or theorists, as great actors in society or history, as among the élite; to make their mark, often, if not exclusively, to make up for their sense of failure or their fragile sense of self-esteem; who see other people as mere objects or abstractions for them to use, manipulate, and, if necessary, destroy in their pursuit of recognition and the esteem of their fellows.

Third, the physician as a psychopath who, because he is himself a soulless machine--in other words a kind of materialist--believes that other people are machines as well, and yet is puzzled by the animation the unseen and unknown soul provides those people, and so cuts them open to find out what makes them alive and human.

Finally, the general effects of moral decay, dissolution, and chaos, and where they lead the individual and the society in which he lives.

No one knows that George Hodel was the Black Dahlia murderer, but even if he wasn't, we can still brand him a monster for what he did to his daughter.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

(1) The publication history of these books and their various editions or revisions is hard to puzzle out. We live in an age in which a "book" may not actually be a book and can be revised and republished and revised again without end, even several times a day if the author wants it. These are the titles and dates I have, though, and they'll have to do.

(2) I have not read the book, so I don't know the details of the authors' hypothesis. However, the online documents I have read supporting their case are measured, well argued, and well presented. See the authors' blog by clicking here. The quote is from that blog.

A young George Hodel (1907-1999), attending to a patient.

Is that George Hodel on the left? No, it's actually Salvador Dali (1904-1989), his near contemporary. On the right is Man Ray (1890-1976), who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951 and who was friends with Hodel. Dali is comic in his intensity. Man Ray is something else. This picture was taken in Paris in 1934 by Carl Van Vechten.

Here is Dali again in a photograph by Denise Bellon (1902-1999), perhaps from around the same period. In their book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, authors Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss make a connection between the Black Dahlia murder and surrealist art and photography. Note especially the breasts of the manikin on the left and the separated torso of the manikin in the middle. When you look at photographs like this one and compare them to photographs of Elizabeth Short's body, you begin to see that Mr. Nelson and Ms. Bayliss' case could be a strong one.

Or this one, also by Denise Bellon.

More yet, this one, by the same photographer.

So why were surrealists so fascinated by manikins? By mutilation and dismemberment? By distortions and mutations of human anatomy? Was it the dehumanizing effects of world war and a decaying civilization? Was it a kind of materialism among the artists themselves? And if it was a kind of materialism, how is materialist surrealist not an oxymoron? The answer begins with recognizing surrealism not primarily as art but as an intellectual theory. André Breton (1896-1966), author of the first surrealist manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924), was a Marxist, i.e., a materialist. Surrealism was--strangely and remarkably--a communist and/or anarchist intellectual movement. As we know, Marxists, communists, socialists, and other assorted leftists have no compunctions about murdering or otherwise inflicting violence on their fellow human beings. That, too, has been a theme in this blog. One more strange and remarkable thing: André Breton trained in medicine.

The body of Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947. A little over a month later, on February 23, 1947, presumably in Boston, Helene Le Berthon married Franklin B. Pollock of Elmira, New York. Helene's father was by then cut loose from regular work as a journalist at the Los Angeles Daily News. I don't know his whereabouts at the time of the wedding. However, in September of that year, he was in Elmira and "in the midst of a nervous breakdown" when he received a visit from his friend J.F. Powers. Powers' visit was evidently a short one. "[T]he situation looked so bad," he wrote in a letter, "so unpropitious to camaraderie, I decided to go to Washington." (1) Powers was otherwise mum on the condition of his friend. When Le Berthon died in Fresno in 1960, Powers wrote, "God bless Ted. I hope to see him in heaven one day." (2)

Don Herold quipped, "Actresses will happen in the best of families." So did Helene Le Berthon's marriage have anything to do with her father's breakdown? Who now can say? The players are all gone from the stage. A decade before, though, Le Berthon had probably helped his daughter break into show business. She is supposed to have been on the staff of the Los Angeles Daily News, his same paper, when she started out in movies. The producer of her first (and apparently only) movie was Fanchon Royer (1902-1981), a woman with a very interesting life story and very probably a friend or acquaintance of Ted Le Berthon going back to the Famous Players-Lasky days of circa 1918-1920. (3) Fanchon started out as an actress. In 1920, she became assistant editor of Camera!, a movie magazine for which Le Berthon wrote the column "Screen Writers Forum." She produced her first movie in 1928 and in the 1930s formed Fanchon Royer Productions, specializing in what we would call quick cheapies. Religious Racketeers (1938) was one of those. Here's how The Film Daily saw the film:

"Religious Racketeers" with Mme. Harry Houdini, Robert Fiske

(HOLLYWOOD PREVIEW)

EXPLOITATION FEATURE BUILT UPON EXPOSE OF FAKERS AIMS FOR STATE RIGHTS MARKET.

This is designed solely as an exploitation picture for the states rights market and achieves its purpose. Madame Houdini, widow of the famous Houdini, plays a role and demands that police war on fakers of all types who prey on the credulous. Robert Fiske enacts the role of a spiritualist, who dupes a wealthy heiress, who is anxious to communicate with her dead mother. Betty Compson, who is one of Fiske's followers, and who is also in love with him, gets her friend, Helen [sic] Le Berthon, the heiress interested in Fiske's work. On Fiske's advice, Helen accompanied by Betty goes to Egypt and India. Unknown to Helen, Fiske also makes the trip, and in Egypt and India, poses as a native spiritualist and is called upon by Helen, who is still seeking spiritual guidance. Arthur Gardner, a newspaperman, in love with Helen, trails Helen and Betty to Egypt and India, and finally manages to expose Fiske as a faker. Frank O'Connor furnished the direction, story and screenplay. Fanchon Royer rates credit as the producer.

CAST: Madame Harry Houdini, Robert Fiske, Helen Le Berthon, Arthur Gardner, Betty Compson, David Kerman, Robert Frazer.

CREDITS: Producer, Fanchon Royer; Director, Frank O'Connor; Author, Frank O'Connor; Screenplay, Frank O'Connor; Adaptation, Charles R. Condon; Cameraman, Jack Greenhalgh, ASC; Dialogue Director, Don Gallaher; Art Director, Paul Palmentola; Editor, George Halligan; Production Manager, Ray Nazarrd; Sound, Cliff Ruberg; Technical Advisor, Dr. Edward Saint; India Sequences, Bhogwan Singh.

Fanchon Royer Features 90 Mins. (4)

The reference to "states rights" is not political, at least I don't think it is. I didn't know what it meant until I read Fanchon Royer's biography on the website Women Film Pioneers Project:

The film [Life's Like That, 1928] was completed and ready for review by June 16 although it did not have a conventional national release through a studio's distribution network; instead Royer sold individual states the rights to it. (Emphasis added.)

Religious Racketeers, also known as The Mystic Circle Murder, opens on a precise date: October 30, 1936, one day short of the tenth anniversary of Harry Houdini's death. Madame Houdini is in the movie, but only briefly. Besides Betty Compson, hers is the only name viewers of today might recognize. Helene Le Berthon plays the female lead. She provides the twist near the end.

Religious Racketeers is now in the public domain. You can watch it on YouTube and other websites. It reminds me of The Amazing Mr. X (1948) and "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" by Harry Houdini (Weird Tales, April 1924), both of which are about fake mediums and spiritualists. Houdini spent a good deal of his time debunking spiritualism. He arranged with his wife that if communication from the beyond is possible, he would, after his death, send her a coded message. She spent years listening at seances for the code. According to Wikipedia, her last seance was in 1936, the same year in which Religious Racketeers is set. By the way, Fanchon Royer converted to Catholicism in 1943. I wonder if Ted Le Berthon was any influence on her decision. In 1945, she moved to Mexico, where she lived out her life and where she died in 1981 at age seventy-nine.

So this brings to an end the story of Ted Le Berthon and his family, but not of another bit player in this drama.

Next: Was the Son of the Black Dahlia Murderer in Weird Tales?

Notes

(1) From Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963 by J. F. Powers and Katherine A. Powers (2013), p. 101.

(2) Powers and Powers, p. 350.

(3) You can read more about her on the website Women Film Pioneers Project, here.

(4) The Film Daily, Apr. 1, 1938. On YouTube, it runs to an hour and seven minutes.

Edith Ogutsch (1929-1990)

Edgar Lloyd Hampton (1872-1951)

Mrs. Edgar Saltus (1883-1960)

Edith de Garis (?-1950)

Marion Carrere (1906-1970)

Abrach (?-?)-Part One

Abrach (?-?)-Part Two

Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part One

Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part Two

Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part One

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Two

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Three

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Four

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Five

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Six

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Seven

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Eight

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Nine

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Ten