Purple Armadillos

Introduction

2010-06-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Early in my journalism career -- 1989, to be exact -- I pitched an idea to my news director at WEOL-AM in Elyria, Ohio, about producing a five-part radio-news series on a relatively new and misunderstood pandemic called AIDS, which had inexplicably surfaced in the rural parts of Lorain County. At the time, the average Joe was convinced that the virus could only be found in metropolitan areas like New York, L.A. and Cleveland. And it could only infect gay men. Or so nearly everybody thought.

My open-minded boss, Jeff Dettmer, intently listened to my many reasons for the series, not the least of which was the appearance of the first nine AIDS cases in the county in the latter half of the 1980s. I also told him that the morticians at the Cowling Funeral Home in ultraliberal Oberlin were refusing to embalm bodies of people who had died of the virus for fear that they also would contract the disease. (Preposterous, right?) But the deal-sealer that gave me the green light to proceed with production on the series was my open access to interview "Rob," a twentysomething-year-old gay man whose case was one of the nine reported to the county's health department. His partner was another.

I met "Rob" on a chilly October evening at his spacious lakefront apartment in a high-rise building in Sheffield Lake. He told me -- between bites of a cheeseburger and cottage cheese -- about the "cocktail" of drugs he was taking to minimize the ravaging effects of the virus. That he had to interrupt our interview several times to run to the bathroom and throw up his dinner only told me that scientists and researchers were worlds away from helping people with AIDS and HIV manage their failing health with any degree of dignity.

"Rob" died a few months after my interview with him. And his partner passed away not long after that. But to meet this couple planted a seed of an idea in my always inquisitive mind that finally would sprout and bloom into my free-to-the-public e-book, "Purple Armadillos: The Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Oddballs of Northeast Ohio's LGBT Community in the 19th and 20th Centuries."

For 21 years, I have toyed with the idea of writing about some of the region's most notable LGBTs and their allies. But I didn't get down to serious business until mid-March of 2009, when I identified nearly 40 people about whom I wanted to research and whose lives I wanted to chronicle. And each of them had to meet three criteria: They had to have lived in Northeast Ohio for at least parts of their lives; their life stories were not only entertaining and worthwhile but educational and inspirational; and they all had to be deceased.

A process of elimination whittled the field down to the 15 chapters that make up this e-book. There's Annie Perkins (Chapter 1), whose mission to make fashion uniform among the sexes in the 19th century is a classic story of lesbian activism long before the Stonewall riots against gays in New York's Greenwich Village in 1969. Stories about Leonard Hanna Jr. (Chapter 2), Langston Hughes (Chapter 4) and Philip Johnson (Chapter 7) clearly show the artistic and/or philanthropic contributions to mainstream society that LGBTs too often are not given enough credit. And the accounts of Gloria Lenihan (Chapter 5), Doris Palmer (Chapter 10) and Hank Berger (Chapter 13) prove that the straight community can be just as supportive of LGBTS as much as LGBTS themselves.

If you call up the "Bibliography" link on the menu, you'll see how many people I need to thank for taking time out of their busy lives to help me with my research. While there are too many to acknowledge in this introduction, I would like to point out a few resources that are immensely helpful to understanding the evolution and history of Northeast Ohio's LGBT community. First, the LGBT Archives at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland offers first-hand accounts of growing up gay in the region, thanks to personal papers, community newsletters and audiotape transcripts. A little-known gem, the Cuyahoga County Archives in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood, is an excellent source of birth, marriage, death and property records. And public libraries in Cleveland, Akron and Lakewood have been heaven-sent, with their catalogs of old newspapers and high-school yearbooks along with trained staff members to help you pore through them.

So you may be wondering: Why have I called the people in my e-book "purple armadillos?" Three reasons, to be honest.

Reason number 1: Purple -- or, more specifically, lavender -- is considered the universal color of the LGBT community. Its symbolic origin dates to the 1920s, when gay composer Cole Porter included the lyric, “I'm a famous gigolo. And of lavender, my nature's got just a dash in it,” in his song, “I’m a Gigolo.” Lavender is also a combination of pink (for girls) and light blue (for boys).

Reason number 2: Scientific research proves that armadillos -- those sharp-clawed creatures with armored shields -- are the only mammals other than humans that are capable of having sex in the missionary position. A strange, but true, fact.

Reason number 3: The “Purple Armadillo” is a tasty, tropical alcoholic beverage. I share the recipe with you in the next link.

Cheers!

Cris Glaser
Lakewood, Ohio
June 30, 2010

"The Purple Armadillo"

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The Purple Armadillo

1. Fill glass with ice.

2. In a shaker, mix one-and-a-half ounces of rum, a half-ounce of blue curacao and equal parts of sour mix and cranberry juice.

3. Shake vigorously.

4. Pour into chilled glass.

5. Top with lemon-lime soda.

Source: Cunningham, Stephen Kittredge, "Sam Malone’s Black Book: The Drink Recipe Collection for the 21st Century," Sixth Edition, Bartender’s Black Book Corporation, Brockton, Massachusetts, 2003, p. 117.

Chapter 1: Anna Perkins

2010-06-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Fashion Camel of Cleveland

Anna Perkins
1848-1900

The skin-blistering wind whipped off the Lake Erie shoreline on that mid-November afternoon in 1899. The first snowflakes of the season also began to blanket the hub of Cleveland’s commercial district on Euclid Avenue, giving downtown merchants a collective boost of hope that the wintry backdrop would put customers in the spending mood for the approaching holiday-shopping season.

On the southeast quadrant of Public Square, in front of the May Company department store, five-foot-tall “Newspaper Annie” violently stamped her feet on the pavement to ward off frostbite. Although she was clad in her daily garb of a man’s coat of coarse white flax, cotton stockings, sturdy boots and a floppy black hat that covered her ears, she uncontrollably shivered in the freezing elements as she cackled “'Penny Press!' 'Penny Press!' Fourth Edition!” with the piercing, nasal vocals that passersby had come to recognize.

Venerable grocer W.P. Southworth watched the pitiful sight from the window of his bustling Ontario Street market. Feeling sorry for the woman, he marched to her corner and, after a quick exchange of words, escorted her across the street to the E.R. Hull & Dutton clothing store. He then told manager J.C. McWatters that he wanted to buy a man’s overcoat for his frozen charge. “A woman’s cloak wouldn’t interest her, you know,” Southworth announced.

Longtime newspaperman Charles E. Kennedy witnessed the transaction. “I recall the old gentlemen counted out forty dollars for the purchase, and Annie passed from the store with a thick, comfortable, masculine outer garment reaching to the top of her ears and, at the base, covering entirely the white stockings,” reported Kennedy, who was in the store to sell advertising space to McWatters. “By disregarding the jeers of boys, who looked upon her with disapproval, meek little Annie, in her manly costume, pointed the way in Cleveland to greater freedom and comfort in feminine wearing apparel.”

Annie’s reputation as a 19th-century lesbian, feminist and fashion reformer finally had reached its zenith. But to understand her eccentricities is to trace her life back to her Seneca County birthplace of Adams Township about 25 miles southwest of Sandusky.

Born Anna Perkins in the summer of 1848, she was the elder of two daughters of Alva and Cynthia Parmenter Perkins. After the birth of a younger daughter, Fanny, in 1850, the family hitched a wagon and moved their belongings 30 miles east to the quaint Erie County burg of Berlin Heights, where her Massachusetts-born father -- who was known by his neighbors as “Boss” -- ran a thriving broom-making business. Her mother, a New York native, stayed at home and took care of the two girls.

At the same time, humorist Artemus Ward was giving the Perkins’ new hometown its 15 minutes of fame in a series of 1858 articles about the night when “I pitched my tent and enfurled my banner to the breeze in Berlin Hites, Ohio.” One story detailed his chance encounter with the Free Love Community, whose members migrated to the village from the East Coast to endlessly preach about a lifestyle that would rival the hippies’ movement more than a century later. The group’s tenets against marriage and in favor of communing with nature included bathing nude together in a public pond. Berlin Heights’ townsfolk was shocked. Ward empathized, after he set up camp in a field near “the Love Cure,” as the Free Lovers christened their outdoor bathtub. “A ornerer set I have never sawn,” he wrote in his trademark folksy style, complete with intentional misspellings and grammatical errors. “The men’s faces was all covered with hare, and they lookt half-starved to deth. Their pockets was filled with pamplits, and they was barefooted. They sed the Postles didn’t wear boots & why should they? That was their stile of argyment.”

The group’s fashion statement also appalled Ward, especially the women who wore men’s trousers and straw hats festooned with green ribbons. They also carried blue-cotton umbrellas. “I addrest them as follers: You women folk, go back to your lawful husbands, if you’ve got any, and take orf them skanderlous gownds and trowsis, and dress respectful like other wimin,” he wrote. “I pored 4th my indignashun in this way til I got out of breath, when I stopt. I shant go to Berlin Hites again, not if I live to be as old as Methooseler.”

While the Free Lovers didn’t make a favorable impression on Ward, they certainly influenced Anna in her adult years. By 1880, she had attempted to reform the village’s dress code by shamelessly wearing pairs of men’s slacks cut off at the knees and snipping off her hair at the neckline. She also adopted a strictly vegetarian diet of raw fruit, cornbread and graham crackers and relied on hydrotherapy, or “water cures,” to rid her of disease, just like the Free Lovers promoted more than two decades beforehand. Not surprisingly, her sister fled the family homestead in embarrassment, unable to deal with Anna’s decadent behavior.

The way Anna treated her aged parents also stunned the Perkins’ neighbors. On December 9, 1880, Alva died at the age of 83 in a house that Anna refused to keep warm. By July 28, 1882, Cynthia had fallen so ill that Berlin Township’s law-enforcement officers had to forcibly tie up Anna with rope because she threatened to shoot anyone who tried to seek medical help for her mother at the Erie County Infirmary in nearby Perkins Township. A letter to the editor from “a citizen of Berlin Heights” set the record straight in the "Sandusky Daily Register" four days later. “Mrs. Perkins was afraid of Anna and dared not say a word,” the anonymous scribe declared. “Anna tore the roof off of their house and took down the chimney while her mother was lying sick within. It is only a wonder that the old lady did not die. It has been a case of extreme cruelty on the part of Anna toward her mother. And I have not told half of the facts!”

But Anna, all alone, focused on a more pressing matter: her poetry. In 1883, she commissioned Nashville printer W.S. Bailey to produce a limited-run edition of her poem, “What Is It?” Measuring three inches by five inches and protected by a yellow cover, each copy of the four-page work carried a five-cent price tag. Not a bad deal, if Anna’s fashion trend piqued a reader’s interest. In an A-B-A-B-C-C rhyming pattern, the poem tried to explain her mission for a uniform dress style between the sexes:

Is it man or is it woman?
Wonder question, is it -- oh, what?
Seems it nearly like the human --
Fashion’s Camel it is not.
It is this perplexes us --
This perchance that vexes us.

Anna broke from her rhyming scheme three-fourths of the way through the piece by placing the last five stanzas under the heading, “My Plea.” Switching to an A-A-B-B structure, she envisioned a society free of the restrictive garments of the late 1880s. A few readers even interpreted her words as a one-woman campaign for public nudity.

Yes, I know you think it queer,
That in this attire I appear;
But this suit is good and grand --
Leaves me free in foot and hand.

I can take the open air --
Be the weather foul or fair.
I can climb, and jump, and run,
Be it work, or be it fun.

Nature’s costume I desire --
Give me simple, grand attire.
Every muscle free to lay,
Clad in Nature’s easy way.

Costume should never impede,
But conform to human need.
Sack and trousers is the suit, --
All objections I refute.

Best for woman as for man,
Like to each was Nature’s plan;
It is easy, light and free --
Just the suit I know for me.

After her 74-year-old mother’s death in the infirmary on June 1, 1883, Anna was practically homeless for the next four years. The Perkins’ home had fallen into such disrepair that she “lived in a piano box in a gravel pit behind A.B. Phillips & Sons’ fruit farm” on East Main Street. She often returned to her makeshift hut to find that village hoodlums had either toppled or demolished it, said 80-year-old Irvin Schatz, the owner of the Village Basket retail shop and treasurer of the Berlin Heights Historical Society.

Thirty-nine-year-old Anna had endured enough of being the town outcast. In the summer of 1887, she scraped together a $1.50 fare, hopped on a streetcar and made her way to the Ceylon Junction depot three miles north of Berlin Heights. She then boarded the eastbound #200 interurban train for a one-way, 75-mile trip to Cleveland on the Lake Erie Electric Railway. After sitting through stops in Beulah Beach, Lorain and Rocky River, she would debut her plans for fashion reform to a more open-minded audience in the big city. Or so she thought.

From the moment she stepped off the train at the Bolivar Street depot, Anna was met with furrowed eyebrows because of her seemingly odd choice of attire and hairstyle. But she ignored the stared from the natives, who thought she resembled more of a circus act than the new girl in town. And she set out to find a one-room apartment at 385 Ontario St., the first in a string of sparsely furnished dwellings she rented during the rest of the century.

Anna’s proximity to Public Square made it convenient for her to land a job as an independent “news agent” for the "Cleveland Penny Press." Competing with teenage boys in a morning scramble to meet the horse-drawn delivery truck, she paid a penny for every two copies she thought she could sell. She then scanned the front page for the boldest headlines, before slinging her news bag over her shoulder and taking her post on the southeast side of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. At ear-splitting decibels, she screamed the news of the day and charged each customer a penny for a copy, doubling her investment in the process. To make the venture more lucrative, she cradled copies of “What Is It?” in one arm for any interested buyer. “'Penny Press!' Poems, two cents!” became her daily mantra.

At first, downtown pedestrians ridiculed and harassed Anna for her appearance, The cops who worked the Public Square beat arrested her at least once for challenging Victorian Age mores on clothing. But in time, she earned tolerance from her 238,000 fellow Clevelanders, who came to know her as “Newspaper Annie.” If anybody dared to question her fashion sense, she simply turned the other way and bellowed her sales calls even louder.

When she wasn’t barking out headlines, Anna occupied her time as an orator for both the Sorosis and Franklin clubs. Founded in New York City in 1868, the Sorosis catered to women who promoted the arts, literature and science. The coed Franklin group served as a forum for debates on such topics as economics, public policy and the role of women in society. Anna often pitched in her two cents in discussions on the Free Love movement that she admired during her Berlin Heights days.

But a cloud of lies and half-truths shrouded the rest of her personal life. For example, Anna concocted a sob story about how her parents died when she was a young girl, even though she was a 38-year-old spinster at the time of her mother’s death. She also tweaked the spelling of her name to “Ana Perkin” or the more peculiar “Ana Purkin.” And between 1889 and 1895, she hid her sexual orientation by telling the publishers of the annual Cleveland Directory -- a predecessor to the modern-day telephone book -- that she was married, although she could produce no document to back her claim.

Nearly year after year, Anna packed up her belongings and moved from one dingy apartment to another. From her Ontario Street digs, she lived for a couple years in “the saloon district” near George Davies’ watering hole at 652 Detroit St. (The busy thoroughfare became Detroit Avenue during a citywide street-name overhaul in 1906.) She then uprooted herself to a cramped room on old Race Street south of where Progressive Field is today. In an apparent yen to live by the lake, she subsequently rented a room for a year at 83 Davenport St. near the shoreline before relocating back to Alcohol Alley in 1899 to yet another dreary space at 171 Detroit St., just east of what is now West 25th Street and near the banks of the Cuyahoga River.

No matter where Anna called home, neighbors vouched that her only worldly possessions consisted of a bed, tin cup, eating utensils, small oil stove and, of course, a meager wardrobe of men’s clothes. That she scrubbed her room with soap and water every day was common knowledge. And her subsistence on raw fruit, crackers and cold water provided juicy gossip. Which takes us back to that brisk, mid-November day in 1899, when the generous W.P. Stallworth laid out $40 for her brand, new overcoat.

The looming afternoon snowstorm signaled the start of weeks of frigid weather during the 1899-1900 winter season. Even the coat couldn’t keep Anna from getting sick, despite her arguments that hydropathic therapy would cleanse her body of disease. By the middle of January, just a couple weeks after the dawn of the 20th century, she was bedridden with a raging 104-degree temperature. Yet, she refused help from her neighbors, who offered to rush her to the hospital.

For two weeks, Anna’s condition deteriorated so rapidly that her physician, L.B. Tuckerman, ordered her to check into St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway Avenue. On Monday, January 29, he diagnosed her in the last stages of typhoid fever, which is caused by a deadly bacteria that is transmitted by ingesting feces-contaminated food or water. But stubborn Anna declined medication and any meals that contained meat or vegetables.

Still, to the nurses’ surprise, her health started to improve. By Thursday, February 1, the fever that had completely left Anna flat on her back fell a few degrees. Shortly before 7 p.m., with two nuns keeping vigil in her room, Anna drifted off to sleep. But her condition suddenly shifted into reverse. Another St. Alexis doctor, S.D. Trowbridge, pronounced her dead at 9:30 p.m., and her body was transported to the undertakers of the Black & Wright Funeral Home at 142 Central Ave. to prepare for burial. Death records erroneously listed her age as 45 years old, another fib she consistently spread.

Anna’s demise made the front page of the next day’s "Plain Dealer," the same newspaper that she tried to outsell in nearly 13 years as a "Press" vendor. The headline to the story, which jumped to single columns on two other pages, screamed, “Ana Perkin’s Life Work Done,” with sub-headlines that characterized her as a “quaint character” who “tried to reform the world.” A pen-and-ink caricature of her dressed in men’s clothes, with a shoulder bag of newspapers slung over her left arm and a stack of poems tucked under her right, accompanied the article.

Toward the end of the byline-free piece, Lieutenant John Burns of the Cleveland Police Department’s Central Bureau described Anna as a “man-hater.” “As long as she has been known here in Cleveland, she has never formed masculine acquaintances,” the officer said. “She always lived by herself and usually in some small and miserable apartment.”

Burns also revealed one of Anna’s pet peeves of which most Clevelanders were not aware: She hated to be photographed. “Snapshot fiends were her special enemies,” he said. “If she noticed an amateur photographer endeavoring to take her picture, she would first do all she could to avoid it. If that failed, she would go for the photographer. I have heard that she made many a young photographer empty his camera of the plate on which was her photo exposure.”

In a fit of rage another time, Anna confronted a group of high-society ladies, who managed to get their hand-gloved mitts on a stray photograph of her image. “She noticed them and started for the pictures,” Burns said. “They retreated into one of the large stores in the neighborhood, and she followed. There was quite a scene in the store, but (she) came out victorious.”

One of Anna’s last wishes requested that her neighbors give Tuckerman the $15 she had saved to help defray her funeral costs. She also wanted to be buried next to her parents. So on Tuesday, February 6, she left Cleveland the same way she arrived: on a Lake Erie Railway interurban. Only this time, she was westbound, first to the Ceylon Junction railway station, then to Berlin Heights.

The next day, revered pastor and noted Erie County historian Hudson Tuttle led a 3 p.m. service at the village’s First Congregational Church at the corner of East Main and Lake streets. Unbelievably, despite all the torment and scorn that Anna endured before she skipped town 13 years beforehand, church records showed that the townspeople turned out in droves for the memorial to see the body of the legendary reformer for themselves. The church choir also sang spirituals to accompany Anna’s “passing to the great beyond,” the "Plain Dealer" reported.

Clevelanders also remembered “the newspaper girl,” who had created a stir when she rolled into town in 1887 with a passion to change fashion norms. At their annual elections meeting on February 14, members of Anna’s beloved Franklin Club met to vote for and swear in John Daykins as their president. As he accepted the honor, he devoted a part of his victory speech to “Newspaper Annie.” “As a society seeking social progress in all directions, we cannot help to admire the steadfastness with which she stood by in her convictions as a social reformer,” he told the roomful of members. “She was a shining example of all progressive people for the sincerity of truth in which she followed her ideals, loving martyrdom rather than conventional subjections.”

---

Anna Perkins was buried in an unmarked potter’s grave beside her parents at West End Cemetery on West Main Street in Berlin Heights. She was 51 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 2: Leonard Hanna Jr.

2010-06-25T13:43:00.002-07:00

The Gentle Giant of the Jolly Set

Leonard Hanna Jr.
1889-1957

To liven the mood at one of Leonard Hanna’s many late-night parties in early 1934, a reveler on the star-studded guest list turned up the volume on the radio in the industrialist’s swanky New York City apartment. The strains of a woeful, country-western tune filled the room to the horror of Cole Porter, who bemoaned the song as sheer drivel with a monotonous melody and senseless lyrics. So the composer of such American-songbook standards of the ‘30s like “Night & Day” and “Don’t Fence Me In” plopped himself in front of Leonard’s sleek, black grand piano and started to improvise his own burlesque version of the ditty.

As Porter revamped the chords and reworked a campy storyline into the song, actor Monty Woolley tiptoed into the master bedroom to retrieve a morning coat from Leonard’s closet. He then picked up a silver tray on a hallway table and made his grand entrance into the living room portraying a butler. By now, he had memorized the lyrics that Porter had just ad-libbed: "Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch to-day-ay, Madam." Everyone burst into gut-splitting laughter and raucous applause.

“Miss Otis Regrets,” about a servant conveying the last words of a proper society lady who’s hanged for murdering her seducer, would become a huge Porter hit by October of that year. And Leonard -- a reserved wallflower at his own soirees -- quietly marveled at the talents of his close-knit collection of fellow gay comrades. “The extraordinary occurrences at his parties were created by other people,” wrote "Cleveland Press" society columnist Winsor French in a 1957 tribute to his longtime companion. “Leonard was no exhibitionist. He merely supplied the background and reveled in what it produced.”

Success and wealth surrounded Leonard all his life. Born on November 5, 1889, on Cleveland’s West Side, Leonard Colton Hanna Jr. was the only child of Leonard Colton Sr. and his second wife, Coralie Walker Hanna. His grandfather, Leonard, and great-uncle, Robert, made millions of dollars in profits in the wholesale grocery trade, then the manufacturing of Lake Erie steamships. His father -- a licensed physician -- and uncles Marcus Alonzo and Howard “Melville” partnered in 1885 to found M.A. Hanna & Company, which became one of the Great Lakes region’s preeminent iron-ore, coal-mining and shipping firms. (Marcus, a staunch Republican, later leaped into politics by managing William McKinley’s successful presidential campaign in 1896 and representing Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 1897 until his death of typhoid fever in 1904.)

The Hanna family fortune allowed Leonard Jr. the luxury of an intensive college-preparatory education at the tony University School in University Heights from 1900 to 1904 and at Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1909. On holiday breaks and during the summer, he retreated to his parents’ 40-room, yellow-brick mansion at 2717 Euclid Ave. on Cleveland’s famed Millionaires’ Row. With its fluted Corinthian pillars, double-armed grand staircase and Chinese gingko trees that swayed on the grounds, the Hanna home stood next to stately manors owned by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, arc-light inventor Charles F. Brush and Western Union Telegraph founder Jeptha Wade. Con artist Cassie Chadwick also lived on the boulevard, even as she passed herself off to bankers as the illegitimate daughter of steel mogul Andrew Carnegie.

In 1909, Leonard entered Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met Woolley, Porter and one in a parade of Porter’s lovers, Howard Sturges. All three men also came from privileged backgrounds: Woolley was the son of a New York businessman, who owned the chic Marie Antoinette Hotel on Broadway; Porter’s largesse came from his grandfather, who made a killing on the timber industry in Indiana; and Sturges was a Boston-born socialite, who tapped into his family’s treasure chest to afford a Yale education. And they all took advantage of a newfound freedom from their families to immerse themselves in a secretive gay lifestyle.

Because homosexuality was still taboo in mainstream society, Leonard tried to disguise his sexual orientation from straight classmates by joining macho organizations, like the Sword and Gun Club. He pledged membership in Delta Kappa Epsilon, whose candidates “combined the most equal parts of the gentleman, the school and the jolly good fellow.” By his senior year, the Class of 1913 elected him its treasurer. And in a rare display of extroverted frivolity, he once agreed to play a bit part in a fraternity musical that Porter had written.

Life after graduation proved just as closeted. Leonard returned to Cleveland to work in his father’s office for a few months before learning the ropes of the steel industry with internships at Republic Iron & Steel plants in Youngstown and Birmingham, Alabama. The company also sent him to study ore ranges in both Michigan and the Mesaba region of Minnesota.

But World War I interrupted his training. On June 5, 1917, Leonard began a 20-month enlistment in the U.S. Army for which he was stationed in Europe as a first lieutenant in its aviation division. He was later assigned to its Motor Transport Corps until he was honorably discharged on February 5, 1919, nearly three months after the war officially ended.

Upon his discharge, Leonard’s father and uncles made him a partner in M.A. Hanna, appointing him to the company’s board of directors and giving him managerial duties in its pig-iron division. He eventually held several offices, including vice-president and member of the firm’s executive committee.

On March 23, 1919, Leonard Sr. died, leaving behind a $3.6 million estate. His will bequeathed one-third of the money to Coralie, while the rest was equally divided between his son and two daughters, Jean and Fannie, whom he fathered from his first marriage to the former Fanny Wilson Mann, who died on July 11, 1885. Now that Leonard Jr. was independently wealthy, he stopped making daily treks to Hanna headquarters, although he remained one of its officers for the rest of his life.

He turned his attention to investments, none of which was more important than the stock purchase he made on December 6, 1923. Acting on a hunch, Leonard paid nearly $110,000 for 1,350 common shares of the little-known Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company. A year later, the New York-based firm changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM. Yes, that IBM. The investment would balloon to $8.8 million by the time of Leonard’s death 34 years later, thanks to dividends, splits and additional purchases of the company’s stock.

On a train ride to New York in 1925, 36-year-old Leonard contemplated his growing net worth. Coincidentally, Cleveland attorney Harold T. Clark, who handled the old man’s estate, was booked on the same train. Leonard called him into his cabin to ask for advice. “I know it’s not going to be good for me to have more money than I need, money which I have not earned,” he told Clark. “I want to set aside some property so I can’t touch it, and it will be best used for good.”

The seed of an idea had sprouted: Leonard would support charities and cultural institutions with his inheritance. The Cleveland Museum of Art would become his first major beneficiary because he had served on its advisory council since 1914 and as one of its trustees since 1920. While the idea was admirable and appreciated, it caught a few insiders, including the museum’s directors, off guard. “He knew nothing about art. He had no training but he became very interested,” said William Robinson, the museum’s curator of modern European art, in a 2008 interview with Salt Lake City public-radio station KUED. “He collected Van Goghs and Cezannes and Picassos. Amazing things. And he was totally self-taught. He became one of the greatest collectors of modern art in the world.”

To say the least. Leonard’s purchase of Picasso’s "Figures in Pink" started him on a lifelong shopping spree. From Seurat’s "Café-concert" and Renoir’s "Mademoiselle la Caux" to El Greco’s "Crucifixion" and Aretino’s "Virgin and Child With Angels," his donations of 70 oil, pastel and watercolor masterpieces through the years collectively formed the foundation of the museum’s 19th-century and early 20th-century collections, particularly the post-Impressionist pieces that caught Leonard’s eye. “Essentially modest in everything he did, he wished no special recognition,” then-director William Milliken wrote in the forward of a 1958 book that the museum published as an homage to its great benefactor. “He merely wished to (help) like many others to the extent he could as one of Cleveland’s citizens working for the same civic ideal.”

By this time, Leonard and his mother had bequeathed their Euclid Avenue mansion to house the original Cleveland Museum of Natural History. They then moved closer to the art museum into a 30-room Florentine-Renaissance home at 10825 East Blvd. Equally as grand as their Millionaires’ Row digs, the 1918-built manse featured hand-painted ceilings, mammoth fireplaces and a super-sized dumbwaiter on which Coralie would often ride. There was also a secret staircase to a third-floor playroom for any children who visited the Hannas.

Leonard’s dark side would emerge in the house’s hallowed halls. Between 1925 and 1927, he carried on a relationship with C. Reese Abednago, a 23-year-old orchestra musician who roomed at 17707 Euclid Ave. On the night of September 17, 1927, a violent fight erupted. Abednago’s attorney, Raymond J. Logan, filed a $50,000 lawsuit more than a month later, claiming that Leonard severely beat his client after breaking off their affair. “Abednago has been under Hanna’s influence for two years, but got mad when Hanna reversed the ‘humiliating act,’” a "Cleveland Press" reporter wrote in his notebook. The case never made it to trial, and there’s no surviving document to prove if Leonard settled out of court with his jilted paramour.

With the thwarted brush of public scrutiny about his homosexuality behind him, Leonard remained low-key for the next decade, except to join his mother in 1931 to make a $750,000 donation to University Hospitals to build Hanna House -- an in-patient rehab center -- as a tribute to his medically trained dad. He also began a quiet romance in the mid-’30s with the 31-year-old Winsor. The pair had much in common: They both adored the finer things in life, including art, theater and overseas travel. And together, they were generous, thoughtful and gracious to everybody they met. The only difference between the pair was that Leonard guarded his privacy while Winsor thrived on being the center of attention.

When Leonard’s mother died on December 3, 1936, he inherited yet another $4 million from her estate. His philanthropic kindness exploded. He donated the East Boulevard mansion to the Western Reserve Historical Society. And in honor of Coralie -- a Kentucky-bred belle who cherished the arts -- he started to make sizeable donations to institutions like the Cleveland Play House and Karamu House, the nation’s first theater devoted to performing the works of African-American playwrights. “He believed in art expression as a great social force,” Karamu co-founder Russell Jelliffe once told the "Plain Dealer." “He thought it helped people keep their heads up and their ambitions pointed, that it made for strong social order.”

Leonard also treated himself to some of the money. He rented a trendy apartment on East 49th Street in New York’s exclusive Amster Yards district. With its black walls, white throw rugs and draperies made of white pigskin, its modern-day touches dramatically contrasted with the elegant Victorian interiors to which Leonard had grown accustomed in his parents’ Cleveland homes. He also decorated the walls with 40 works of art he acquired on his around-the-world expeditions for the art museum.

While he was in the Big Apple, Leonard developed into a creature of the night. He never awoke before noon, always sleeping with black patches over his eyes to keep out the sunlight. After he drank his first cup of coffee, he planned his evenings that usually included a Yankees baseball game or club-hopping between the Century and 21 nightspots. He relished spicy food and became giddy when he discovered a new restaurant he liked. And his apartment turned into party central for the rich and famous, gay and straight.

On August 21, 1941, Leonard established the Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund with $1.2 million in M.A. Hanna stock for nonprofit and education-based organizations. He showered theaters, museums and hospitals with grants to expand their operations. And to keep the fund financially afloat, he continued to buy stock in no more than 11 companies, such as General Electric, General Motors and IBM. Financial advisers today would cringe at his modus operandi, since diversification -- investing one’s money in several companies in a variety of industries -- was not in his vocabulary. Leonard also dubbed his venture “the Hanna Fun” because of the joy that philanthropy provided him. “You could work with him,” said Henry Sayles, the art museum’s curator of paintings, prints and drawings from 1929 to 1967, in an early-1970s interview at his New Hampshire retirement home. “I used to go constantly to him about the various purchases we wanted to make. And so often, he would buy them outright.”

Leonard then made a startling announcement: He was going to volunteer for the American Red Cross for two years to establish rec centers for American airmen stationed in England during World War II. By early 1944, he had set up nearly 100 clubs before he asked to be transferred to the European continent as the war progressed across the English Channel. But a crippling illness forced him to return to the U.S. in May of 1944. The setback marked the beginning of years of deteriorating health.

To keep his mind off his aches and pains, Leonard focused on a real-estate project that would consume much of his time in the mid-’40s. In 1945, he paid more than $1 million for a 316-acre spread in Kirtland Hills. The estate featured a three-story Tudor home of brick and stucco that was built in England in 1472 and moved brick by brick to Northeast Ohio in 1924. Considered the oldest existing home in the state, the 7,600-square-foot main house was flanked by a gatehouse, caretakers’ quarters, barn, greenhouses, pool, bathhouse, stables and, of all things, a pig sty. Leonard christened the compound “Hilo” because of the rolling hills that surrounded the property. “When he first bought it, he once told me he used to walk barefoot at night through the meadows, almost unable to believe the soil he could feel beneath his feet was his own,” Winsor recalled in one of his columns.

After wintering in New York, Leonard spent his summers at Hilo, where he entertained a steady stream of celebrities, politicians and athletes, who collectively became known as “the Jolly Set.” At his lavish weekend parties, it was not unheard of to catch gay actor Clifton Webb talking sports with boxing champ Gene Tunney and baseball great Tris Speaker. Nor was it unusual to see silver-screen siblings Dorothy and Lillian Gish fawn over Pulitzer Prize-winner author Louis Bromfield. College buddies Woolley, Porter and Sturges even planted trees on the grounds to celebrate the prized home purchase. Above all else, if you were invited to the estate once, you had a standing invitation to stop by anytime.

Leonard again channeled his energy to the Hanna Fund. By 1953, he was making frequent and substantial contributions to at least 35 museums, schools and health agencies. He also maintained memberships in several social groups, such as the Tavern, Union and Mayfield Country clubs as well as the Cleveland chapter of the Yale Alumni Association, for which he served as its president in 1927.

But by October 27, 1953, Leonard sensed his failing health wasn’t going to correct itself. So he fired off a one-page missive to the fund’s board of trustees with directions for the “ultimate disposition” of his money after his death. The letter stipulated that the trustees should give the highest priority to the art museum, Hanna House and Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. It also specifically directed them to “remove discrimination in colored and white relations.”

One of Leonard’s last public appearances took place on July 14, 1956, when he attended the laying of a cornerstone for the art museum’s new $9 million wing to which he contributed half of its construction costs. His vision to turn the museum into one of the country’s foremost showplaces of important art had come true. “No one had done more than he to bring that dream to reality,” Milliken said after the ceremony. “But whatever he did was always done with complete and self-effacing modesty.”

Leonard wouldn’t live to see the opening of the wing in the spring of 1958. On Saturday, October 5, 1957, he died of natural causes at Hilo. He was survived by Winsor, his two half-sisters, eight nephews and nieces and 25 great-nephews and great-nieces, all of whom attended a private memorial service at the estate two days later. Naturally, the mourners eulogized his charitable work. “He had, so to speak, listening posts, and from them, he would learn, perhaps, that some youngster needed an artificial leg or that a brilliant, promising young student was going to have to withdraw from college unless given financial help,” Winsor wrote. “Actresses who had seen happier times were mercifully snatched from the greased skids. Drunks were rehabilitated, serious operations paid for and hospital expenses absorbed. He was convinced that you could find shreds of dignity worth retrieving in the most tattered skid-row bum.”

By all accounts, Leonard gave away $93 million during his lifetime, with one-third of the cash donated to the art museum. And an inventory of the estate valued the Hanna Fund at $29.4 million, with the bulk of the money invested in IBM, du Pont and both A and B classes of M.A. Hanna stock. Even his personal checking account at National City Bank contained more than $257,000 on the day he died.

Leonard’s will, dated November 7, 1952, told an even clearer story of his wealth. Filed in Lake County Probate Court, it listed an additional $10 million in assets. The art museum would get 70 percent of the money as well as the $1.5 million art collection in his Manhattan apartment. It left $500,000 each to Yale University and University Hospitals. And the Cleveland Foundation’s Community Fund received $250,000.

Other gifts included $100,000 in trust for each of his nephews and nieces. A cousin in Kentucky received $25,000. And bequests worth between $500 and $5,000 went to each of Leonard’s domestic staff members based on length of service. After all the disbursements were made, it became obvious that he was just as generous in death as he was in life. “I spent winters with him in Florida and California, traveled with him from Rome to Tahiti,” Winsor wrote in his final tribute. “Should a stranger ask me what sort of person Leonard was, I think I would tell him he was the most soft-spoken, truly tolerant and liberal man I have ever known.”

---

Leonard Hanna Jr. requested that his remains be scattered at his Hilo estate at the corner of Little Mountain and Hart roads in Kirtland Hills. He was 67 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 3: Hart Crane

2010-06-25T13:43:00.001-07:00

The Poet in the Ivory Tower

Hart Crane
1899-1932

The "U.S.S. Orizaba" picked up steam as its barreled along its usual Mexico-Cuba-New York route, when the clock struck high noon on that tropical April day in 1932. On each of the ship’s decks, passengers marveled at the blazing sun, just minutes after the 443-foot liner left the Havana dock and set sail on the Gulf of Mexico. To painter Margarite “Peggy” Baird, the trip back to New York signaled a new beginning; she was returning to the Big Apple a soon-to-be-divorced woman from her second husband, literary critic Malcolm Cowley.

As she sat in her stateroom, a horrific scene was playing out on the top deck. A fellow artist had walked to the railing, neatly folded his topcoat over it and raised himself on his toes. He dropped back for a couple seconds and shouted, “Goodbye, everybody!” before he vaulted himself over the rail into the warm waters below. Some passengers said he frantically flailed his arms in a desperate motion for help; others simply chalked up the hand-waving as his way of bidding a final farewell. Cries of “Man overboard!” pierced the air. But the crew’s search of the gulf in several lifeboats was fruitless. The poet had sunk to his watery grave. “He had rapped on my stateroom door before he jumped from the deck and said that he wanted to say goodbye,” Baird told the Associated Press once the ship docked in New York Harbor several days later. “Of course, I didn’t dream what he meant.”

If she had only known the truth. The spur-of-the-moment suicide leap marked the end of Hart Crane, a Lost Generation writer whose tormented life was riddled with financial woes, long stretches of writer’s block and a homosexual existence in a largely homophobic, 20th-century society. But whether or not he realized it, critics already had hailed his poems as some of the most influential literary contributions of the Jazz Age. And it all started in Northeast Ohio.

An only child, Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in the small Portage County town of Garrettsville about 45 miles southeast of Cleveland. His grandfather, Arthur, and father, Clarence Arthur (“C.A.”), ran a flourishing maple-sugar cannery in town. His mother, the former Grace Edna Hart, was a beautiful, cultured yet neurotic Christian Science practitioner. To outsiders, the Crane clan that lived on Freedom Street came from the best stock the village could offer.

The Crane men expanded their company to Warren in neighboring Trumbull County in 1903. Business exploded and C.A. decided to sell the plant to a Chicago refinery. The profit he made on the deal helped finance his new venture: the Crane Chocolate Company.

Meanwhile, friction between the incurably frisky C.A. and the prim and proper Grace grew so intense that they shuttled young Harold to Cleveland’s East Side in 1908 to live with his maternal grandparents, Clinton and Elizabeth Belden Hart. The separation would spare him the constant bickering between his parents, they reasoned. In a three-story house at 1709 E. 115th St., Harold spent most of his time in “the ivory tower” on the top floor, where, at 14 years old, he started to jot down pieces of poetry as his Victrola blared recordings of Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner compositions.

Harold’s East High School classmates were well aware of his passion for the written word, even more so when "Bruno’s Weekly" published his Oscar Wilde tribute, “C33,” in September of 1916. This first taste of literary recognition convinced him to drop out of school a year before graduation and move to New York City to pursue a career as a writer the following December at about the same time his parents’ divorce became final. The social and sexual liberties he discovered in the big city amazed his Northeast Ohio sensibilities. “New York is a series of exposures intense and rather savage, which never would be quite as available in Cleveland,” Harold wrote to his dad in his first letter away from home.

Once he was in New York, he rented an apartment on Gramercy Park, where he acquainted himself with seasoned writers and poets like Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank and Allen Tate. He also befriended fellow Cleveland natives, including painter Carl Schmitt and publisher Harrison “Hal” Smith. At the end of March of 1917, his poem, “The Hive,” appeared in "Pagan." This latest publication of his work prompted an excited Harold to write to his dad to pick up a copy of the magazine at Laukuff’s, a recently opened bookstore run by German immigrant Richard Laukuff at 40 Taylor Arcade in downtown Cleveland. His mother also insisted that he adopt his middle name, Hart, as his byline to give her side of the family part of the recognition for his success. A lack of steady income, however, forced him to board a train and head back to his grandparents’ home in June of 1918.

The homecoming proved a disaster. Hart couldn’t keep a job, lasting three weeks as a riveter in a munitions plant on the Lake Erie waterfront. He tried his hand at newspaper reporting, only to quit his $20-a-week, police-beat assignment at the Plain Dealer after two months. He also rushed downtown to the Army’s recruitment office to volunteer for overseas duty, but the military turned him down.

The string of rejections and setbacks led to frequent drinking binges that the 19-year-old Hart couldn’t handle well. In his half-crocked stupors, he explored his sexuality by trolling sleazy saloons in Little Italy to try and pick up men. His unwanted advances naturally sparked violent brawls that left him bruised, battered and sitting in a jail cell. He also broke down in an alcohol-fueled letter and confessed to his mother that he was gay. He pleaded with her to never tell his father.

By February of 1919, Hart successfully persuaded his dad to give him regular $25-a-week allowances so he could return to New York. He first moved into a three-room, $3.50-a-week basement rental on West 70th Street with three roommates, including Alexander Baltzly, who was a Harvard alumnus, Army lieutenant and champion tennis player. He then lived alone in a $10-a-month, two-room flat on West 16th Street above the offices of the "Little Review" magazine, for which he took the unpaid position of advertising manager. He also volunteered for editor Joseph Kling at "Pagan." But his father’s allowances suddenly stopped and, once again, Hart’s bank account dried up. For the second time in two years, he had no choice but to return to Northeast Ohio in November of 1919.

Good thing, too. By this time, C.A. had expanded his candy company by building a factory at 208 St. Clair Ave. in downtown Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga County Justice Center is located today. He had opened a small tearoom on Playhouse Square and rented retail space in Akron, where Hart worked as a soda jerk and sold boxes of Crane Chocolates from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day during the holiday season. The size of the family business made him think of dollar signs. “Things are whizzing, and I don’t know how many millions (my father) will be worth before he gets through growing,” he wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson, a Pagan writer whom he had met through Kling in Greenwich Village earlier that year. “If I work hard enough, I suppose I am due to a goodly share of it, and as I told you, it seems to me the wisest thing to do now is to join him.”

His father’s business acumen in 1919 had sharply improved from that of eight years earlier, when he arguably made the stupidest move of his candy-making career. In 1911, while still in Warren, C.A. tinkered with a recipe for “Crane’s Peppermint Life Savers” to boost his profit margin during the usually slow summer season for candy sales. He chose the treat’s name because each of the hard, round sweets looked like a miniature life preserver. But because he shipped packages in cardboard tubes that absorbed the candies’ minty flavor, the product was virtually tasteless by the time his distributors received it. Besides, nobody wanted to pay a nickel for a package of mints “with a middle made of thin air.” Production proved costly, forcing him to sell the recipe and its trademark to a two-man advertising firm in New York for a measly $2,900. The partners re-packaged the candy in foil to retain the taste and, by 1930, their company was raking in a quarter-million dollars a year in Life Savers sales.

Business blunder aside, C.A.’s company was thriving by the end of 1919. So was Hart’s personal life. He had been transferred to Cleveland after the holidays to manage a basement warehouse in his dad’s factory. And after writing a glowing review of Sherwood Anderson’s short-story collection, "Winesburg, Ohio," he was regularly corresponding with the Elyria-born author. He also frequented Laukuff’s bookstore, where he met other artists like Swiss-born painter William Lescaze, Cleveland Play House set designer Richard Rychtarik and Cleveland Institute of Music student Jean Binet, who was studying under Cleveland Orchestra conductor Ernest Bloch.

And in more letters to Munson, Hart described a “love affair” with an unnamed paramour from Akron, although he failed to reveal to his friend that the relationship involved another man. “Whatever might happen, I am sure of a wonderful pool of memories,” he pounded out on his Corona typewriter. “Perhaps, this is the romance of my life. It is wonderful to find the realization of one’s dreams in flesh, form, laughter and intelligence -- all in one person.”

But in a December 27 confessional, Hart revealed his secret, trumpeting it as “the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole life,” he wrote. “I am all broken up at the thought of leaving him. Yes, the last word will jolt you. I have never had devotion returned before like this, nor ever found such a soul, mind and body so worthy of devotion. Probably I shall never again.”

The distance between his work in Cleveland and his boyfriend in Akron led to the romance’s fizzle by the spring of 1920. That autumn, Hart had been assigned to temporarily manage his dad’s new store in Washington, D.C., where he found the nation’s capital “all rather dead,” even though he managed to hook up for one-night stands with a small stream of soldiers and sailors on leave. He found the anonymous encounters disgusting and cheap. After his return to Cleveland, he resigned from the family business on April 19, 1921, claiming his position was “a terrible, old grind.”

Hart floated from one odd job to the next. For a $2.50-a-day wage, he distributed sales fliers door to door. He lasted one day. He then landed a gig as a copywriter for the Corday & Gross Company at 1771 E. 24th St. After work, he partied with his circle of artist friends and played host to out-of-town visitors like Anderson and Munson. He also continued to trick with total strangers. “I have been driven at last to the parks,” he wrote on the Fourth of July in 1922 to Wilbur Underwood, a gay poet and government worker he met in Washington. “The first night brought me a most strenuous wooing and the largest instrument I have handled. As this happened only two nights ago, I am modest and satisfied. Still, I am uneasy. I fear for all the anti-climaxes that are surely now in store for me.”

Five months later, he was sharing one of his ultimate fantasies: To have sex with a black man. He even called his imaginary lover “L’Afrique.” “My anticipations were so strong and my desire to give you a shock was so gleeful that I announced it as a fait accompli, when, in reality, it was only dependent on the promise of another person to arrange such an assignation,” he wrote in another letter to Underwood on December 10. “I am sorry to relate that it never came to pass. I am still limited to the experiences of a single race. The dark and warm embrace is yet to come!”

Fearing that his job at Corday & Gross provided no room for a promotion, Hart sought work in the winter of 1923 from Stanley Patmo, who had started a direct-mail advertising firm that would become the Roger Williams Company at 3804 Payne Ave. He was hired to bang out ad copy for clients like Pittsburgh Water Heaters, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and the Akron-based Seiberling Tires. He was dependable and cheerful in the office, never letting his late-night drinking bouts get in the way of his work in the morning.

At home in his grandparents’ ivory tower, Hart obsessed over what would become one of his first important poems of his literary career. The three-part “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” was his answer to T.S. Eliot’s perceived cultural pessimism in the 434-line poem, “The Waste Land.” Hart described his piece as “a bit of Dionysian splendor” with rhythmic jazz meters and interwoven symbolism that painted the “basic emotional attitude toward beauty that the Greeks had.” It took more than a year for a magazine to agree to publish the poem in its entirety.

Hart contemplated his next “new enterprise,” one that would consume the next seven years of his life. The modernist epic, "The Bridge," would result in a collection of 15 poems that traced the history of American civilization, from Christopher Columbus’ discovery of it in 1492 to the Civil War to modern advancements such as its subway system. And the Brooklyn Bridge, a New York landmark that Hart admired, would serve as the piece’s focal point. The project also would be his first and, ultimately, only attempt at long-form poetry. In its preliminary stages, the piece captured “the mystical synthesis of America,” he wrote in a February 18 letter to Munson.

But Hart faced yet another professional obstacle: Patno’s ad agency had to let him go in March of 1924 because the company had no assignments to give him. For fear that C.A. would think of his son as a failure, Hart persuaded the company to concoct a scheme that would take him to New York on a month-long “business trip,” when, in fact, he would look for another job. When he found work, he could return to Cleveland and feign resigning his position.

The plan worked. After a series of a half-dozen interviews with its executives, Hart was hired by the J. Walter Thompson Agency in late May to work in the firm’s statistical department for a $35 weekly salary, a substantial pay cut from the $50 a week he was earning at Patno’s place. But he was at the point of accepting any kind of employment; he was literally down to his last handful of pennies as he temporarily stayed with Munson and his wife, Lisa, in their apartment.

Once he was back on his feet, Hart settled into a room on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. After work, from five at night to two in the morning, he worked on The Bridge to capture the “feelings of elation…that one experiences in walking across my beloved Brooklyn Bridge,” Hart said. Above all else, he insisted that no magazine could ever publish this series of poems in bits and pieces as a few publications tried to do with “Faustus and Helen.” But because of his drive to write poetry full-time, the drudgery of daily office work dragged him down. He abruptly quit his Thompson position in October. He’d never have financial stability again as he sponged off friends for money, food and a roof over his head to concentrate on his art.

Enter Emil Opffer. In the spring of 1924, Hart met the Danish-born merchant marine through their mutual friend, Sue Jenkins. At her house, the career sailor regaled his audience with tales of every port of call he visited. Hart fell in love with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Emil, who was three years his senior. The couple was soon living together in Emil’s father’s house on Columbia Heights in, ironically, the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Because Emil was often at sea, they were apart more than they were together. And Hart documented his feelings of separation in a series of six love poems appropriately titled Voyages.

His catalog of original poems continued to grow and, by the spring of 1925, Hart decided the time had come to self-publish his first book of pieces, including the Voyages series and “Faustus and Helen.” Greenwich Village publisher Samuel Jacobs even offered to donate his expertise to typeset a run of the book’s first 500 copies when he wasn’t working on other projects. "White Buildings," whose titled was inspired by the artwork of Greek surrealist painter Giorgio di Chirico, hit bookstands later in the year.

To keep himself further occupied, Hart continued to work on "The Bridge," but he needed money to support himself. On a whim, he fired off a letter on December 3, 1925, to ask respected arts financier Otto Hermann Kahn to financially back his epic. Three days later, the two men met in Kahn’s apartment, where Hart stated his case. It was impossible to write such a complex piece in a reasonable amount of time if one had to spend half his day in a menial office job, he argued. While he was timid about asking for help, he was convinced that "The Bridge" would “enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America.” Kahn bought the sales pitch and agreed to loan the poet $2,000 to be paid in four installments, the first of which he immediately issued. Hart couldn’t believe his good fortune. Somebody was actually going to pay him to write nothing but poetry, he told a few friends.

With the first loan payment, Hart planned to buy a ticket to sail to his maternal grandmother’s winter retreat, Villa Casas, on the Isle of Pines directly south of Havana. Discovered by Columbus on his third trip to the New World in 1494, the island had inspired scenes in both Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Treasure Island" and James Matthew Barrie’s "Peter Pan." Its sandy beaches, tropical fruit orchards and legendary tales of pirate invasions could add to the romanticism of writing The Bridge, Hart reasoned.

The arrangement didn’t quite work out as he imagined. The house was virtually uninhabitable. The roof leaked, its gardens were overgrown, and mosquitoes swarmed everywhere. But it provided the privacy that Hart required to write freelance book reviews and shorter poems to supplement Kahn’s generous loans while he toiled on his epic. And there was Mrs. Simpson, the house’s caretaker, to keep him company.

Still, Hart’s frequent jaunts to the mainland to smoke Cuban cigars and pound back bottles of native beer nearly exhausted the next two loan installments. Another pleasure trip to the nearby Cayman Islands and an emergency doctor’s appointment in Havana for an ear infection added to his financial misery. He wrote to Kahn in August to ask for the last $500 of the loan. Unfortunately, his benefactor was traveling and didn’t receive the letter until two months later.

Hart had no choice but to stay put at Villa Casas to immerse himself in "The Bridge." Poems like “The Mango Tree,” “Cutty Sark” and “Ave Maria” emerged from the marathon writing session. Then, as anticipated in the Caribbean in the middle of October of 1926, a hurricane slammed into the island. And Hart loved every minute of it.

As ferocious winds whipped through the house, he huddled under his bed with Mrs. Simpson and her chatty pet parakeet, Attaboy. In the morning, they celebrated their survival by dancing to Spanish music from Hart’s record collection. But they decided that there was no sense in staying on the island since it would take months to repair the storm-battered house. So Hart returned to New York with a suitcase of clothes and drafts of his poems. He also collected the last installment of the loan that Kahn promised.

Hart moved back in with Emil’s father (and Emil, whenever he was home on leave). He also presented the drafts to Kahn, who was pleased with what he read and offered to loan yet another $300 for Hart to continue the project, this time on the Caribbean island of Martinique. C.A. also sent a $100 check “in order that you have plenty of cash to start off with,” he wrote in an accompanying letter.

But the trip never materialized. A mentally irrational Grace -- who was living in Hollywood with her widowed mother -- claimed she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If she did go crazy and he went back to the Caribbean, she groaned that his grandmother would have no one to take care of her. An angry Hart canceled his steamer ticket and immediately left for California to move into a cottage that his mother was renting. But Southern California offered him no motivation to work on The Bridge, with such distractions as the roar of the surf and the glamour of movie stars.

Emil, who was sailing on the "U.S.S. California," also arrived one evening in March of 1927 on a few hours’ leave. The pair ended up in a speakeasy in San Pedro, where five thugs robbed them of their belongings and practically left Emil for dead. He recovered on the ship as it sailed to its next stop in San Francisco. “He always seems to get the hardest end of things,” Hart wrote to his friends, Bill and Sue Brown, in New York.

On April 3, exactly six months to the day when he announced he was going to California, Hart walked into a travel agency and booked a one-way train ticket to New York. He couldn’t wait another minute to get out of town and finish "The Bridge." The five-day trip drummed up much-needed inspiration, especially when the train lumbered into New Orleans. There, Hart could see the mouth of the Mississippi, about which he had written in “The River” section of the piece. “There is something tragically beautiful about the scene, the great, magnificent Father of Waters pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf,” he wrote to his father, who had opened a restaurant and inn, Crane’s Canary Cottage, at the corner of West and West Orange streets in Chagrin Falls.

Hart gave himself a July deadline to wrap up "The Bridge" upon his New York return. But the guilt he felt at leaving his mentally ill mother only sparked another bout of writer’s block. The imposed target date came and went. Before he knew it, 1927 turned into 1928. He still had not finished the project.

In September, his beloved Grandmother Hart died. While he waited for word on any kind of inheritance from her estate, Hart’s drinking escalated. Stories circulated that, when he was smashed, he accused anybody within earshot of cheating him out of money, success and fame. Then came the final blow: He learned in November that Grace -- who was the executrix of her mother’s will -- refused to sign the papers to release Hart’s $5,000 inheritance unless he rejoined her in California. He never spoke to her again.

Another of his closest relationships came to a screeching halt in 1929. Home on leave, Emil caught Hart in bed with another man in the Columbia Heights apartment. A “stupid betrayal,” the sailor lamented. After five years, the lovers parted ways romantically, but they remained friends for the rest of Hart’s life.

The beginning of 1930 brought a happier note. After seven years, Hart finally finished "The Bridge," and publisher Horace Liveright was going to order a 250-book run of its first printing. But with the country in a newfound economic depression, Hart worried that nobody would buy a copy. He was equally anxious how literary critics would review it.

The book drew mixed reaction. An early critique by Herbert Weinstock compared Hart’s style to that of Walt Whitman. "The Nation" reviewer Granville Hicks wrote that the poems’ imagery was “sound and amazingly original.” "New Republic" critic Malcolm Cowley -- one of Hart’s first acquaintances in New York -- considered “The River” as “one of the most important poems of our age.”

Yet there was also a chorus of disapproval. In "The Bookman," writer Odell Shepard bemoaned that the poems “proceed with frenzy in the wrong direction.” "Hound and Horn" reviewer Allen Tate trashed the book for its lack of a coherent plot. And thanks to critic Percy Hutchinson, the revered "New York Times Book Review" panned "The Bridge" for its “lack of intelligibility.”

Despite the jolting feedback, Hart decided to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship and an accompanying $2,500 grant to study and write abroad. He mailed his application on August 27 and prepared to wait until the following spring, when the foundation would announce its decision. Hart then packed his suitcase and moved to Chagrin Falls to stay with C.A. and his new wife, the former Bessie Meacham. He helped out in his dad’s candy factory during the holidays. He also made daylong trips to Garrettsville and Warren to visit aunts, uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen in years.

The Guggenheim news came on March 15, 1931. Of 712 applicants, Hart and 76 other scholars, writers, artists, musicians and scientists had scored one-year grants to create and research in other parts of the world without financial worry. One catch: Because Hart wasn’t married, his grant could not exceed $2,000. It didn’t matter; his money woes were seemingly over so he could study in France.

But at the last minute, he changed his mind about his ultimate destination. Instead of Europe, where most fellows chose to study, Hart asked to live south of the border. There, he could write an epic poem about Montezuma’s conquest of the Mexican people. His supervisor, Henry Allen Moe, approved, and Hart boarded the "Orizaba" steamer in early April with his stipend: $300 in cash in his wallet and a certified letter showing a $1,700 line of credit.

The liner embarked from New York for the southward four-day sail on the Atlantic to its midway stop in Havana. The second leg took Hart west to the port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. The last part of the journey included a 264-mile train ride over mountain ranges to the Mexico City suburb of Mixcoac, where he rented an eight-room Spanish villa, complete with his own manservant.

Between Cuba and Mexico, Hart developed a new passion: tequila. For weeks, he drank a lot and wrote very little. His drunken tears through town resulted in frequently obnoxious brawls and jail stints. He even disrupted a formal tea party at the American Embassy in Mexico City, which prompted a string of anonymous complaints that were wired to Guggenheim headquarters. Moe had no choice but to issue a letter in which he scolded the rowdy poet for making the foundation look bad and ordered him to “get down to work.”

On July 6, Hart received an unexpected cable from his stepmother, Bessie, who let him know that C.A.’s health was quickly failing. A follow-up telegram later in the day confirmed that his 56-year-old father had died of a stroke. Hart immediately booked an airplane flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then a train ticket on the Santa Fe Railroad’s Grand Canyon Limited back to Chagrin Falls.

Hart stayed in Northeast Ohio for six weeks after his dad’s funeral and burial on July 12 in Garrettsville. He also learned that he would inherit $1,000 from C.A.’s estate and collect as much as $2,000 annually from the profits of his father’s candy factory, retail stores and Crane’s Canary Cottage. The latter part of the inheritance was a long shot since, in the depths of the Great Depression, most of the ventures were losing money. In fact, his father was nearly bankrupt when he died.

Hart returned to Mexico at the end of August to find that Peggy Baird Cowley had arrived to initiate amicable divorce proceedings against her husband. Twelve years Hart’s senior, she also knew the poet well. The pair bonded. And for the first time in his life, he fell in love and had sex with a woman. At a New Year’s Eve party that Peggy was throwing in the town of Taxco north of Acapulco, the couple officially declared their love and faith for each other.

The affair fueled a much-needed burst of poetic creativity. On January 27, 1932, Hart started work on “The Broken Tower,” a piece that scholars have determined is both an affirmation of his introduction to a straight life and a denial of his past gay relationships. But it had nothing to do with Montezuma, Mexico or anything thing else he promised to write for the Guggenheim folks. His never-ending drinking binges and at least three threats to commit suicide by drinking iodine didn’t help matters, either.

The end of Hart’s fellowship came in April, but he had little to show after an entire year in Mexico. Depressed and defeated, he made arrangements for him and Peggy to sail back to New York. “Altogether, I have had a terrible time lately,” he wrote to his stepmother on April 22. “I wouldn’t have thought of staying here another minute anyway. Do you wonder I’ve been anxious to get off as soon as possible? It certainly has made a nervous wreck of me.”

Hart and Peggy boarded a train to Veracruz the next night and left the country on the New York-bound "Orizaba" two days later. The ship reached its halfway point in Havana on April 26, when the pair accidentally separated and couldn’t find each other. They finally reunited in the liner’s medical clinic after Peggy severely burned herself from a box of matches that exploded in her hands as she lit a cigarette in the ship’s lounge.

Hart -- who had downed a few cocktails in his search for her -- was furious. In a moment of irrational thinking, he was convinced that Peggy had burned herself on purpose to grab attention. His behavior then switched gears to sympathy. And in a clear sign that his mind was unraveling, he again became infuriated, locked himself in his cabin and bolted the door shut. While it’s debatable if this particular date helped alter his frame of mind, April 26 marked Emil Opffer’s 35th birthday.

To this day, rumors and secondhand stories continue to haze the account of Hart’s last hours on the ship on Wednesday, April 27. Some passengers heard that he picked up a sailor and had a gay fling during the Havana stopover. Others recalled that he sneaked out of his room at 1 a.m. for another round of drinking, only to be escorted back at 4 a.m. by a steward. Hart even told ship personnel that a stranger attacked him in his cabin and stole his ring and wallet.

Peggy stopped by the doctor’s office later that morning to have her burns re-bandaged. She returned to her room shortly before 10 a.m. to find a nervous Hart waiting for her. He was shaking uncontrollably and said he needed a drink. At 11 a.m., a steward saw him swilling shots of whiskey in his cabin. Just before noon, Hart stuck his head into Peggy’s room to announce that he was “utterly disgraced” and abruptly left.

Dressed in pajamas and a topcoat, he walked to the top deck and leaned against the railing. He took off his coat and folded it. After a couple seconds of contemplation, he flung himself off the stern into the gulf waters. He made no effort to reach out to one of the lifeboats that had been lowered to save him. And for two hours, at the direction of Captain J.E. Blackadder, rescue crews circled the area, with Peggy and her fellow passengers watching for some sign of life. Hart was never seen again.

For decades after his suicide, critics analyzed Hart’s life, including his homosexuality. In a 1937 "Plain Dealer" review of Philip Horton’s biography, "Hart Crane," writer Ted Robinson blamed the poet’s “perverse personality” on a “terrible psychopathic handicap that set him apart from normal men and women, and alienated the major portion of his intellectuals.” The newspaper’s contributing editor, N.R. Howard, wrote in a 1962 article that Hart’s sexual orientation was an “inversion” that led to his “alcoholic, shabby and hungry” existence. And a 1981 story by reporter Tom Kaib characterized the poet’s “sexual persuasion” by mentioning “alcoholic and sexual debauches.”

On the other hand, Hart remained a literary icon among fans of his work. Performers at Kent State University’s Blossom Festival School memorialized him in a 1974 concert of his poems set to music. The school even wanted to hang a plaque on Hart’s childhood home in Garrettsville. Unfortunately, the man who owned the house served with the Ohio National Guard. Because of the shootings that killed four Kent State students during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration four years earlier, he wanted nothing to do with the university and refused to have a marker attached to his house.

But the memorials continued. Noted Cleveland sculptor and Shaw High School graduate William Mozart McVey created "The Hart Crane Memorial," a bronze statue that was installed near the intersection of East Boulevard and Bellflower Drive across the street from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The piece joined the 16-foot "Long Road" wall relief at Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center and a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Olympic track-and-field star Jesse Owens on Lakeside Avenue as one of 48 publicly displayed sculptures in McVey’s repertoire.

The Ohio Canal Corridor also earmarked $500,000 for its historic- and cultural-enhancement initiative in 1994. The organization then purchased a half-acre of land to build Hart Crane Park at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Merwin Street near the Commodores Club in the Flats of Cleveland. The agency also bought a 1992 master work dedicated to Hart by artist and former Cleveland State University professor Gene Kangas, who designed a two-piece metal memorial flanked by two light-blue structures that simulated crashing ocean waves. Stanzas of Hart’s poetry were etched into the structure for the enjoyment of commercial and recreational boaters alike as they sailed past the park on the Cuyahoga River:

Far strum of foghorns
Fog-insulated noises
Midnight among distant chiming buoys adrift.

A tugboat wheezing by
Wreaths of steam
Lunged past a sound of waters bending astride the sky.

Follow your arches
To what corners of the sky they pull you
Where marble clouds support the sea wreck of dreams.

---

Although Hart Crane’s body was never recovered, his father’s family added the inscription, “HAROLD HART CRANE, 1899-1932, LOST AT SEA,” to the base of C.A.’s tombstone in Section A, Lot 601, Plot 17 of Park Cemetery at the corner of Center Street and Brosius Road in Garrettsville. Hart was 32 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 4: Langston Hughes

2010-06-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Langston Hughes
1902-1967

Langston Hughes scholars have debated the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer’s sexual orientation for decades. The African-American community’s notorious refusal to admit that any black man is gay only exacerbates the matter. The “down-low” phenomenon, in which closeted homosexuality runs rampant in minority circles, also adds to the aura of a gay enclave in Urban America.

In Langston’s case, one side of the aisle has concluded that he was gay, citing passages from several poems that shed light on his perceived homosexuality. They point to published personal letters in which he describes intimate encounters with other men. A couple of low-budget biographies for both the silver and small screens also fuel their argument.

Their detractors, including those who personally knew the poet and playwright, insist that Langston exhibited no behavioral traits that suggested he was attracted to men. Even his official biographer isn’t convinced that he was gay. That the same biographer is now the co-director of Langston’s estate leaves one to think that his position may have influenced his conclusion.

The fencer-sitters also have chimed in with their opinions, claiming Langston was asexual, in which he had an indifference to both men and women. The theory is definitely plausible since the infamous 1950s Kinsey study on sexuality showed that 1.5 percent of the male population fits the description. So why don’t you decide?

Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, James Mercer Langston Hughes came from a line of trailblazing civil-rights pioneers. His maternal grandmother, the former Mary Sampson Patterson of North Carolina, was one of the first women to ever enroll at and graduate from Oberlin College in Lorain County. In October of 1859, her first husband, the 24-year-old harness maker Lewis Sheridan Leary, was gunned down as he crossed the Shenandoah River during John Brown’s unsuccessful slave revolt in Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Together only a year, the couple produced a daughter, Louise, who was six months old when her dad was killed.

Mary married a second time 10 years later to Charles Henry Langston, who was born in Virginia to a white plantation owner and an emancipated slave of African- and Native-American ancestry. Like his wife, he went into the history books. In 1835, he, with his older brother, Gideon, was one of the first blacks to be accepted at Oberlin. And by 1858, he and his younger brother, John Mercer, co-founded the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society to fight for equal rights, suffrage and the same educational opportunities afforded to whites. Three years earlier, John became the first African-American in the country to be voted into office after he was elected clerk of the Lorain County township of Brownhelm. In 1888, after moving back to Virginia, he made more history with his election to the U.S. Congress as the first black representative from the state.

Meanwhile, Charles had bought a 125-acre farm and apple orchard north of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1868. He then returned to Northeast Ohio to wed Mary in Elyria on January 18, 1869. After the ceremony, the couple relocated to Kansas, where he continued his mission in America’s heartland to campaign for equal rights for all blacks. Mary, meanwhile, bore two more children: Nathaniel Turner in 1870 and Carolina “Carrie” Mercer in 1873. The couple also took in a foster son, Dessalines, who was named after a leader of the 1790s slave revolt in Haiti, which subsequently became the first independent nation ever ruled by blacks.

In 1872 in Kansas City, Charles became principal of the Quindaro Freedman’s School, the first state-chartered, four-year university for African-Americans west of the Mississippi River. The Kansas Republican Party also nominated him that year as one of its four delegates to cast the state’s votes and give Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant a second term as U.S. president. Weary of the rural life, he sold his farm 16 years later and moved to a home in Lawrence, where he partnered with businessman Richard Burns to operate a grocery store.

By the time he died of chronic stomach problems on November 21, 1892, the 75-year-old Charles helped establish the Interstate Library Association, led the Colored Benevolent Society and served as a grand master of the Colored Masons. He was also deeply involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “For nearly three decades, (Charles) had been a leader of the campaigns in Kansas for black suffrage and for blacks’ rights to serve on juries and in the state militia,” historian Richard B. Sheridan wrote in his 1999 essay, "Charles Henry Langston and the African-American Struggle in Kansas." “Moreover, he was a leader in seeking improved social and economic conditions for black citizens.”

Daughter Carrie graduated from high school a year after Charles’ death and before she enrolled in a two-and-a-half-month program for a certificate in kindergarten and elementary education at Kansas State Normal School in Emporia. By 1898, she was teaching school in Guthrie in the Oklahoma Territory. There, she met Indiana native James Nathaniel Hughes, a 27-year-old law clerk whose mixed-raced heritage of Scottish, Jewish and African-American ancestries prevented him from taking the state bar examination.

The couple married in Guthrie on April 30, 1899. The match was like oil and water. The fun-loving Carrie adored the theater, literature and shopping sprees; the aloof James was tight-fisted with his money and harbored fierce resentment toward the African-American race, presumably because of the barriers he faced because of it. Despite their personality differences, the newlyweds moved across the border to Joplin in the southwest corner of Missouri, where James landed a $25-a-month job as a stenographer for a lead- and zinc-mining company. Carrie also learned she was pregnant. Their first son, however, died after his birth in February of 1900. A year later, the pair headed east to Buffalo, New York, where she became pregnant again, this time with Langston.

Despite the pregnancy, the Hugheses’ marriage stood on rocky ground that led to a separation. James fled to Cuba, then to Mexico City, where he worked as the personal secretary to the head of the Pullman Palace Car Company, a leading manufacturer of sleeper cars, streetcars and trolley buses. Meanwhile, Carrie returned to Joplin to give birth almost two years to the day after the death of her first son.

Langston seldom saw his mother as a toddler after Carrie accepted a job as a stenographer for an African-American lawyer in the Kansas capital of Topeka. Instead of taking her son with her, she left him with her mother in Lawrence, where, as an elementary-school student, he discovered an inherited passion for the theater and books. He began to write poetry. He also delivered both The Saturday Evening Post and the town’s weekly newspaper to subscribers.

It’s not clear when Carrie’s divorce from James became final. But by 1915, when Langston was 13 years old, she married Topeka cook Homer Clark, who had custody of his two-year-old son, Gwyn Shannon, from a prior marriage. After Grandmother Mary died in the wee hours of April 8 at 79 years old, the Clarks settled that summer in Lincoln, Illinois, about 30 miles northeast of the capital of Springfield.

Langston enrolled in the eighth grade at Central School, where he impressed teachers with his intellect, friendliness and even temper. He also was elected class poet because of his skin color, he reasoned. “There were only two of us Negroes in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry,” he said years later. “Well, everyone knows -- except us -- that all Negroes have rhythm. So they elected me as class poet.”

Langston delivered his graduation poem during a ceremony on May 31, 1916, on the same day his unemployed stepfather left Lincoln for Cleveland. At the end of the summer, he, his mother and stepbrother joined Homer, who eventually found work as a machinist in the steel mill. The family lived in a dank basement apartment at 11217 Ashbury Ave. between Superior and Euclid avenues and near Wade and Rockefeller parks in University Circle. Langston also signed up for his freshmen year at Central High School and found an after-school job peddling ice cream in Bessie Kitzmiller’s confectionary at 3943 Central Ave.

A bright student, Langston was one of a handful of African-Americans in a class of predominantly white kids whose parents had immigrated from Europe. He excelled at graphic arts, ran on the school’s track team and, during the summer after the ninth grade, earned more spending money by running a dumbwaiter at Halle’s department store downtown. The job, he later wrote, awed him when he saw wealthy shoppers buy pricey perfumes and cigarette lighters that cost six times the rent his parents were paying every month.

But Langston’s home life abruptly collapsed, when his stepfather walked away from his marriage and hopped on a westbound train to Chicago. Carrie, hoping for a reconciliation and with Gwyn in tow, soon followed and left Langston to fend for himself in a room in a boarding-house attic at 2266 E. 86th St. north of Quincy Avenue. (The Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation of Cleveland bought the dilapidated home for $100 in November of 2009, with tentative plans to renovate it into a museum of Hughes memorabilia.)

Because the only meal he knew how to make for himself consisted of boiled rice and hot dogs, Langston spent much of his time at the home of his closest buddy, Sartur Andrzejewski, a blond-haired, Polish-Catholic classmate whose mother and two sisters fattened up the boys on sausage and cabbage. He also sought respite at the “Playground Settlement,” the first community center that Russell and Rowena Woodham Jelliffe founded in 1915 to showcase the best African-American writers, actors and dancers of the day. The husband-and-wife team would play a pivotal role later in his life.

During the summer of 1918, Langston decided to join his mother in Chicago. Homer again had split town, leaving Carrie and the two boys in yet another drab one-room apartment in the Windy City. The trio, however, made the best of the situation, with Langston earning his keep by delivering hats for a milliner who hired Carrie as a maid. But Chicago, teeming with whites who despised minorities, proved too dangerous, and he boarded a Cleveland-bound train by himself to start his junior year at Central High.

Langston immediately plunged into school life. His class elected him to a seat on the Student Council. He served as president of the patriotic American Civic Association and secretary of the French Club. His extra-curricular activities also included membership in the Home Garden Club.

On top of all his after-school interests, Langston embraced the world of journalism by signing up as a writer for the school’s newspaper, "The Monthly." He submitted poems and short stories, including one that depicted a backwoods girl inviting a paperboy and his family to her wealthy aunt’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. He also was appointed the editor of “The Belfry Owl,” a satirical section of the newspaper in which contributors submitted written observations of the goings-on at Central. And because of his work on the publication, Langston honed his poetic writing style. His English teacher, Ethel Weimer, helped by introducing him to pieces by such poets as Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, whom he described as his “guiding star.”

One of the highlights of Langston’s junior year came in the spring of 1919, when Carrie and Gwyn came back to town and rented a shoebox of an apartment at 5709 Longfellow Ave. south of Carnegie Avenue. His mother found work as a waitress. And unexpectedly, his father, James, wired a telegram to invite his son to spend the summer with him in Mexico. Langston jumped on the offer.

The south-of-the-border sojourn proved eye-opening. Langston learned that his dad had acquired three pieces of property: his home in Toluca, a spacious ranch 40 miles away in Temascaltepec and a rental house another 44 miles away in Mexico City. He also discovered that his father was a vociferous racist, who told his son to “look at the niggers” as they passed a field of laborers picking cotton.

Langston’s prolific poetry-writing helped soothe the tension with James. His writing style evolved with a maturity that was invigorated by his observations of the escalating racial and political battles in the U.S. He also depicted Cleveland in his pieces. “I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day,” he explained years later.

In September, Langston booked a seat on a Pullman for the train ride home to Cleveland to begin his senior year at Central. He amazed his fellow track-and-field teammates by clearing the high jump at five feet and six inches, a spectacular feat considering the bar was set two inches higher than his five-foot-four-inch frame. He continued his responsibilities for both the Student Council and French Club. He also tried his hand at acting in school plays.

Langston’s final year of high school flew by quickly. On June 16, 1920, his 127-member senior class graduated in Central’s auditorium, where he pondered his academic future. Should he stay in Cleveland and enroll at Western Reserve University with Andrzejewski and a few other classmates? Or should he follow his instincts and apply to the more exclusive Ivy League college, Columbia University, in New York City to be near other writers? If he headed to the East Coast, he’d certainly need financial help from his dad in Mexico. So a month later, he traveled back to Toluca to argue his case. The reunion unexpectedly lasted a year.

During his stay, Langston made a living as a tutor to the children of the city’s mayor. He often spent his free time at the bullfights in Mexico City. And, on at least one occasion, he patronized a bordello, although there’s no evidence to suggest that he had sex with any of the female prostitutes.

In June of 1921, African-American scholar, author and editor W.E.B. Dubois published Langston’s 14-line poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the NAACP-sponsored magazine, "Crisis." The piece became his signature lyric, primarily because of its focal line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The nationwide exposure of its publication must have impressed James because he offered to spring for his son’s Columbia tuition, but only if Langston majored in engineering and not creative writing. The gesture, however, was ill-fated. Although he maintained a B-plus grade point average, Langston dropped out of school a year later, citing on-campus racial prejudice for his decision.

Instead, he started to absorb the mushrooming arts-and-music scene of the black community in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. And, under the wings of the much older gay “father of the Harlem Renaissance,” Alain LeRoy Locke, he moved from his seven-dollar-a-week, fourth-floor room at the YMCA’s Harlem branch to a boarding house at 267 W. 136th St. that he and fellow writers Countee Cullen, Wallace “Wally” Thurman and Richard “Bruce” Nugent affectionately dubbed “Niggeratti Manor.” Nugent went so far as to make the rooms more festive by painting homoerotic murals on the walls. And the housemates developed a reputation for their all-night parties.

The question, then, remains: Was Langston gay? With the exceptions of an exhaustive two-volume biography and a couple of docudramas, historians seldom have written about his sexuality, even with hypotheses and conjecture. The guessing games start with his collection of gay comrades, including Cullen himself.

A year younger than Langston, Countee Leroy Porter was abandoned at birth by his parents and raised by his paternal grandmother until her death in 1918. At 15, he was adopted by Episcopal minister Frederick Ashbury Cullen in Harlem. He won many poetry-writing contests as a teenager and edited his high school’s magazine. Although he later married twice, he told his first wife that he was sexually attracted to men. His laundry list of potential suitors included Langston, who showed no reciprocal interest.

Langston also maintained a friendship with openly gay writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, who championed the Harlem Renaissance stable of artists and writers. His 1926 novel, "Nigger Heaven," about a librarian and a writer who try to keep their romance alive in the face of rampant racism, created a stir after its publication. The book’s title alone referred to a Jim Crow-era phrase about theater balconies, where African-Americans were corralled during stage performances while white audiences sat in the more comfortable seats below.

To further analyze Langston’s sexual orientation, consider his six-month voyage to West Africa as a crew member aboard the "S.S. Malone" in June of 1923. The freighter made several stops, including the Nigerian capital of Lagos and the largest Canary Island of Tenerife. In both ports of call, he experienced his first two man-to-man sexual encounters with a couple of frisky crewmates. Both of them wanted him to play the “male” role in bed, he told his secretary decades later.

On his way back from Africa in early 1924, Langston left the ship to work in the kitchen of a Parisian nightclub for a few months. By November, he was living with his mother in Washington, D.C., where she was staying with relatives from the John Mercer Langston side of her family. He also found a job as the personal assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson at the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. But the demands of the position left him little time to write. So he resigned to bus tables in the restaurant of the Wardman Park Hotel in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Good move, too. One evening, as he cleared dirty dishes and silverware in the dining room, Langston spotted Vachel Lindsay, who was one of the era’s most heralded American poets. He seized the moment and presented the Illinois-born, Hiram College-educated writer with copies of three of his poems. From that night on, an obviously impressed Lindsay declared he had discovered new African American talent.

At the same time, Langston scored a first-place prize for his poem, “The Weary Blues,” in a writing contest sponsored by "Opportunity" magazine. Thanks to Van Vechten’s connections, he inked a book deal with the Knopf Publishing Company. His debut collection of poetry, "The Weary Blues," featuring the five-year-old “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,“ hit bookstore shelves in January of 1926.

Langston still wanted to complete his college education, despite his disconcerting freshmen year at Columbia. He enrolled for the winter semester at Lincoln University in the Pennsylvania town of Oxford near Philadelphia. Founded in 1854, the college staked its claim as the oldest historically black school in the country. And Langston immersed himself in campus life with other classmates, including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He also pledged membership in the Omega Psi Phi social fraternity, whose motto, “Friendship is essential to the soul,” spoke for itself.

Langston’s first semester at Lincoln ended in June, just in time for "The Nation" magazine to publish his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The memorable “manifesto,” as some historians have described it, addressed both the struggles and achievements of African-Americans writers, painters and musicians. “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote. “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter, either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how. And we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

In early 1927, Langston’s sophomore anthology of poems, "Fine Clothes to the Jew," stormed the literary world to the dismay of many African-American book critics. Its title itself raised a few eyebrows because it referred to poverty-stricken Harlemites, who traded their wardrobes for cash in Jewish-owned pawn shops. Many black reviewers railed against the book because it concentrated on the poorest segment of black society. Yet, the work further established Langston as an artistic force in the Harlem Renaissance.

The distinction made an impact on Charlotte Osgood Mason. The wealthy widow of a distinguished surgeon, parapsychologist and hypnotherapist, her inheritance financially backed several Harlem artists, including painter Aaron Douglas and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. The feisty, overbearing “Godmother,” as she insisted her young beneficiaries call her, added Langston to the mix that spring and oversaw his work on his first novel, "Not Without Laughter," about an African-American boy and his impoverished family in the Midwest.

Langston graduated from Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree in 1929 and returned to Harlem to write his book, insisting that he would always make New York City his home. “I’ll never leave Harlem for anywhere else,” he told his Niggeratti Manor housemates.

Yet, right before "Laughter’s" release in 1931, he and Mason quarreled over creative differences in his writing. As a result, Langston retreated to Cleveland for a homecoming with his mother, who had returned from Washington to rent a home at 4800 Carnegie Ave. He didn’t tell his benefactor about his whereabouts.

Langston only intended to stay with his mom for three weeks, after which he would pay for a trip to Florida with the next check that Mason sent him. Ten days later, however, the matriarch of the arts wrote that she was financially cutting him off for good.

Three weeks turned into three months before good news materialized. The Harmon Foundation awarded "Laughter" its annual gold medal for Langston’s contributions to fine arts in the African American community. The prize came with a $400 check that would help him finance a trip to the South. At the suggestion of the Jelliffes, who had since founded the predominantly black Gilpin Players theatrical troupe, he chose Zell Ingram, a 21-year-old gay man as a traveling companion. The pair took turns behind the wheel of Carrie’s Ford to Miami, then hopped on a train to Key West. From there, they boarded a boat to Havana, where Langston was treated like a celebrity as he alighted onto Cuban soil. His published works had electrified readers as far as the Caribbean.

Biographers have well documented the second half of Langston’s life in his ascent as an influential poet, playwright, novelist and newspaper columnist of the Harlem Renaissance. For these pages, though, the focus now will shift to his Northeast Ohio connections since the region remained a magnet for him, primarily because of the Jelliffes’ theater, Karamu House, at 3807 Central Ave.

In the fall of 1935, Langston’s mother moved from her Carnegie Avenue digs to a three-room apartment at 212 S. Pleasant St. in Oberlin. The town occupied a special place in her heart because both of her parents graduated from Oberlin College. Because of his proximity to Cleveland, Langston made frequent trips to the city for poetry readings. And he regularly visited the Jelliffes, who asked him if he would like to become Karamu’s playwright-in-residence. They needn’t say more. The offer was a no-brainer.

Langston’s debut offering, "Little Ham," took a farcical look at the numbers racket in Depression-era Harlem. For the most part, the play wowed theater critics after its Karamu debut on March 24, 1936. They trumpeted it as “hilarious” and “side-splitting,” with predictions of a possible run on Broadway and an adaptation on the silver screen. Langston’s next Gilpin Players production, "Troubled Island," was staged in May. The two plays marked the beginning in a long line of scripts that he would write for the troupe.

Although Langston returned to live in Harlem -- he would buy a townhouse at 20 E. 127th St. in 1948 -- his subsequent Cleveland visits in the ‘40s and ‘50s included several poetry readings at the main branch of the city’s public library. He also served as master of ceremonies at the Cleveland Black Folk Festival in 1952. One of his last public appearances took place at the Jelliffes’ golden-anniversary party for Karamu House in 1965.

On May 6, 1967, in New York City, Langston felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He was rushed to New York Polytechnic Clinic, where, six days later, he underwent prostate surgery to remove a potentially cancerous mass at the bottom of his abdomen. The operation went well. However, Langston’s condition started to take a downward turn three days later, when physicians diagnosed him with bronchopneumonia. His temperature also skyrocketed to 103 degrees, causing him to slip in and out of consciousness.

Two more days passed with no signs of improvement. Wheeled into the hospital’s intensive-care unit, Langston lapsed into a coma. At 10:40 p.m. on Monday, May 22, he died of septic shock, a virulent medical condition that kills half of its victims.

About 200 invited mourners, including chanteuse Lena Horne and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche, gathered at Benta’s Funeral Home in Harlem on May 25 to pay their respects. Playwright Arna Bontemps, with whom Langston had sometimes collaborated, read some of his buddy’s poems. Later, at a Manhattan crematory, a handful of friends broke into a recitation of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

After Langston’s death, accolades continued to mount in his honor. Among them, the City College of New York awarded its first Langston Hughes Medal in 1973 to recognize an influential and entertaining African-American writer. New York City officials bestowed landmark status on his Harlem home and renamed East 127th Street as Langston Hughes Place. And in 2002, the U.S. Postal Service celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth by portraying his image on a postage stamp in its Black Heritage series.

Literary scholars and historians alike have also studied Langston’s poems to glean even a hint of his sexual orientation. Some analysts have determined he was asexual. Other researchers have concluded that he kept his homosexuality in the closet for fear its discovery would make him a pariah in the African-American community. And there’s yet another army of intellects, who are certain that he led a gay lifestyle. “He was always eluding marriage. He said marriage and career didn’t work,” said Jean Blackwell Huston, former head of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in an "Esquire" magazine article in February of 1992. “It wasn’t until years later that I became convinced he was homosexual.”

Throughout the course of his career, Langston made noticeable changes in the subject matter of his poems and short stories. While most of his early works depicted the plight of Black America, his later pieces exhibited a homoerotic nuance. For example, in the poem, “Trumpet Player” --- which appeared in his 1947 collection, Fields of Wonder -- a reader can visualize the protagonist in the act of oral sex with another man: “The music from the trumpet at his lips is honey mixed with liquid fire/The rhythm from the trumpet at his lips is ecstasy distilled from old desire.”

The unpublished “To Beauty” similarly radiated a homosexual overtone. The first line of the piece, “To worship at the altar of beauty,” was a well-known gay code phrase during the Jazz Age to describe intimate, same-sex encounters. And “Café: 3 A.M.,” which made its debut in his 1951 anthology, Montage of a Dream Deferred, clearly described a police raid on a gay nightclub.

Detectives from the vice squad
With weary, sadistic eyes spotting fairies.
Degenerates, some say.
But God, nature or somebody made them that way.
Police lady or lesbian over there?
Where?

Langston also seemed to go out of his way to draw parallels between himself and the main character in his 1961 story, "Blessed Assurance." The piece, about a father who flips out over his son’s effeminate nature, portrayed Delmar as “a brilliant, young queer, on the honor roll in high school, and likely to be graduated in the spring at the head of his class.” In the story, he also was a member of the French, Glee and Drama clubs, and dreamed of going to Paris after graduation.

The likenesses were more than coincidental. For starters, Langston, like Delmar, excelled at academics. He was an officer in Central High’s French Club and acted in theatrical productions during his senior year. He also spent a few months in France after his West African stint on the Malone.

Furthermore, both boys were products of broken, dysfunctional families. They even were named after ancestors on the maternal sides of their families. And as if Langston again was writing in code, the name of Delmar’s church-choir director, Manley Jaxon, gave readers pause to wonder. The choral maestro’s first name obviously referred to virility; his surname was that of five-foot-two-inch Frankie “Half-Pint” Jaxon, a popular African-American drag queen of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

At least two filmmakers have weighed in on the debate. In 1988, British director Isaac Julien made the 42-minute, black-and-white flick, "Looking for Langston," to memorialize the writer’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance from a black, gay vantage point. Julien also intended to “construct a narrative that would allow viewers to meditate and to think, rather than be told,” he said in interviews. The tribute eventually won a Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 1989 Berlin International Film Festival.

Upon its 1990 release in the U.S., the executors of Langston’s estate tried to censor the film, claiming they never gave Julien permission to incorporate readings of the writer’s poetry into the script. They also demanded that movie houses had to cut off the sound during screenings when Langston’s work was heard. “Clearly, (Langston) never wanted to be known publicly as gay,” wrote Stanford University professor Arnold Rampersad in his biography, "The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World." “In the absence of clear evidence that he was, how could (former estate administrator George) Bass do otherwise than oppose Julien’s willful, even flagrant, abuse of (Langston’s) name and of the wishes of his estate?” (You, the reader, should know that Rampersad is now one of the estate’s co-administrators.)

The film, "Brother to Brother," by documentary filmmaker Rodney Evans received less controversy after its debut at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where a jury awarded a “special prize“ to the piece. Set in modern-day New York, the movie portrays a gay art student who meets Langston’s former housemate, Richard “Bruce” Nugent, in a homeless shelter. As the movie flashes back to 1920s Harlem, the author and painter can be seen cavorting with such writers as Langston, Wally Thurman and Zora Neal Hurston in scenes that suggest that nearly every Niggeratti Manor tenant was homosexual. After Sundance, the movie made the rounds of gay film fests as well as occasional airings on public television.

Before his death of AIDS-related complications at 38 years old in November of 1995, gay black poet and activist Essex Hemphill continued to challenge African-Americans’ ignorance of homosexuality within its community. To explore the sexuality of black icons like Langston is to unearth the truth behind their legacies. “The silence surrounding black, gay and lesbian lives is being meticulously dismantled,” he said. “Every closet is coming down. Those closets are ancestral burial sites that we rightfully claim and exhume.”

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Langston Hughes’ remains were interred beneath a medallion embedded in the foyer of the Arthur Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd. in New York City. He was 65 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 5: Gloria Lenihan

2010-06-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Matriarch and Her 12-Inch Rule

Gloria Lenihan
1904-1994

In the 1950s, when Cleveland ranked as the country’s seventh largest metropolis, the city’s downtown district buzzed with theatergoers on Playhouse Square, music aficianados on Short Vincent and clubhoppers everywhere in between. The city’s LGBT population was no exception. On the southwest corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, gay men treated the two-story Cadillac Lounge as their personal playground in the midst of dozens of straight clubs that lined Cleveland’s busiest thoroughfares. “We used to refer to it as ‘General Motors,’” Len Barnhart said as he chuckled at the memory. “But it was a very chic bar. During the day, it was straight. In the evening, it was gay. And everything was very proper. You had to wear a shirt and a tie and a jacket to get in there.”

The club’s policies came courtesy of its matronly owner, Gloria Lenihan, who demanded decorum and civility in the first-ever openly gay nightclub in Cleveland history. When she wasn’t policing her patrons, she held court on her favorite stool to keep an eye on the cash register, as retired professor Bill Fairchild remembered her. “In Europe, the owner sits at the far end of the bar to watch what the bartender is doing,” he said. “She was the same. That was her style.”

Born in the spring of 1904 on Cleveland’s East Side, Estelle Gloria Stefanski was the elder child and only daughter of Polish-Catholic immigrants Anton and Anna Rutkowsky Stefanski, who arrived in Cleveland in 1896. Her father worked as a pipe fitter on the railroads while her mother stayed home with her and her brother, Henry (“Hank”), who was four years younger than she.

The Stefanski family maintained a relatively quiet, blue-collar lifestyle until 1918, when Anton converted the storefront below their second-floor home into a soda fountain at 16101 Arcade Ave. in the heart of the Collinwood district. The next year, he expanded his operation to include chocolates and penny candies. But he ditched his confectionary business in 1922 and opened a shot-and-a-beer saloon in the same spot. The neighborhood tavern gave his daughter her first glimpse at the kind of living that selling alcohol could provide.

Gloria still lived at home until she was nearly 30 years old. She helped her parents with their $50 monthly rent by working at the "Plain Dealer," for which she sold advertising space and subscriptions over the telephone until 1932. She also Anglicized her surname to Stevens, which was common among young adults with European-born parents. Her first and only beau, Charlie, then came into the picture.

Four years older than Gloria, Charles L. Linehan was the middle of three children born to James, a machinist, and his wife, Minnie. The family lived at 298 Starkweather Ave. in the Tremont neighborhood, where, in the early ‘20s, James also modified his surname by juxtaposing the i and the e in “Linehan” to create “Lenihan.” Neighbors assumed the family was of Irish descent, but James’ ancestry actually was rooted in England.

Charlie’s entrepreneurial spirit emerged in 1925, when he teamed with two buddies, Jerome Shaffrank and Bernard Schulist, to pool together money and build a nondescript, 8,387-square-foot commercial structure at the corner of Clifton Avenue (now Clifton Boulevard) and West 117th Street on the Cleveland-Lakewood border. Its original eight storefronts housed such small businesses as Lillian Rudolph’s beauty parlor, Martha Ferguson’s gift shop and Harry Mahr’s hardware store for which the trio of businessmen collected between $20 and $200 rental fees from each tenant every month. Over the next 80 years, other occupants ranged from Lakewood Floral and the Kluck Brothers’ restaurant to a Charter One bank branch and Twist Social Club. Roger Haker’s bowling alley also would be added to the mix on the south side of the building in 1941, only to be razed 24 years later.

In 1932, Charlie -- who had just divorced his first wife, Marie -- was renting an apartment at 1406 W. Clifton Blvd. in Lakewood. One of his neighbors was Gloria’s brother, Hank, who was a collections manager for the Guardian Fidelity auto-financing agency. He introduced Gloria to Charlie, and the couple dated for two years before tying the knot in 1934. Apartment number 7 in the Lewis Villa, a modest brick building at 13386 Madison Ave. in Lakewood, became their first marital home.

The Lenihans immediately launched into a whirlwind of business success that started with a restaurant at 15622 Madison Ave., just a few blocks from their apartment. By 1942, their roster of commercial acquisitions included Lenihan’s Grill at 6501 Detroit Ave. on Cleveland’s West Side and the fabled Otto Moser’s restaurant at 2044 E. Fourth St. downtown, across from the old Cleveland Opera House. Charlie also took over ownership of the Pickwick Tavern in the same Clifton Avenue building that he helped finance in 1925. All told, the couple was said to have owned as many as 37 nightclubs and eateries throughout their lives.

Their banner year came in 1943. Gloria branched off on her own and opened the Cadillac at 2016 E. Ninth St. There, the glamorous Lana Turner and a teetotaling Mae West were said to have stopped in on separate occasions when each of the actresses was performing on stage at Playhouse Square.

The Lenihans also dabbled in the real-estate game, buying parcels of land and rental properties as if they were playing a game of Monopoly. Their purchases included a lot on Clark Avenue near Fulton Road, a Mediterranean-style villa on Edgewater Drive and a ranch home on Avalon Drive in Rocky River. They eventually added a lakefront retreat in Avon Lake to their portfolio.

In early October, the couple finally bought a home for themselves: a three-story mini-manse of dark brown cedar and tan stucco at 11502 Edgewater Dr. at the corner of Harborview Ave. Built in 1928 on a quarter-acre lot, the 3,903-square-foot Tudor Colonial featured four bedrooms, three bathrooms and two fireplaces. The view from the top of the grand staircase with gumwood banister provided a glimpse of the dining room, an attached sun porch and adjoining library. The kitchen was adorned with maple cabinets, a double oven and an island in the center of it. In early 2010, the house was put on the market for $550,000.

But life wasn’t always idyllic; Charlie and Gloria faced their share of legal tangles. In June of 1942, the Ohio State Board of Liquor Control suspended Charlie’s permit at the Pickwick for 10 days for illegally selling booze on Sundays. The board also lodged gambling charges against Otto Moser’s in 1946, but it subsequently dropped the allegations because the evidence was, at best, flimsy. And in January of 1947, appellate Judge Joy Seth Hurd ordered Charlie to change the name of the Pickwick after a Superior Avenue restaurant with the same handle sued for name exclusivity. The court then slapped $100 fines on both Charlie and Gloria for contempt of court six months later because the bar still bore the Pickwick name. The couple reluctantly rechristened the club the Pickwood Café.

There were even attempts to rob Charlie of his burgeoning wealth. On a frigid January 25, 1948, he parked his car in his driveway minutes after he closed the Pickwood for the night. As he slammed the car door shut, two thugs tried to jump him for the $300 in his wallet. He wrenched himself free from his attackers before he reached into his overcoat for the .38-caliber revolver he had carried for protection for the past 15 years.

Gloria, who was awakened by the commotion, called the police while Charlie fired three shots as he chased the wannabe robbers south to the corner of West 110th Street and Lake Avenue. He eventually lost sight of them. But the cops determined that he probably didn’t pump a slug or two into either of the heavies because they couldn’t find any blood spots in the snow.

Despite the occasional brush with violence, the Lenihans’ businesses were booming, especially Gloria’s gay nightspot. Every evening, she parked her Rolls-Royce in the back of the club. A short, heavy-set woman with legs that patrons described as tree stumps, she hobbled inside, where she implemented her “12-inch rule” in which no two men could sit or stand less than a foot away from each other. She then perched herself on her appointed stool at the end of the bar, kept tabs on the bartenders’ service and listened to pianist Harry Mott, who ended his set each night with a rendition of “God Bless America.”

Gloria also was notorious for her strict dress code. Shirts had to be pressed. Trousers had to be creased. And no man gained entrance without a necktie. The code worried Richard Swanson, who returned to Cleveland from his Army stint in Germany one night in 1962 and asked a taxi driver at Hopkins International Airport to drop him off at a gay bar. Standing at the door of the Cadillac, he was still wearing his Army greens. “So I asked Gloria, ‘Is it okay if I’m in uniform?’” Swanson remembered. “She said, ‘That’s fine. You can stay.’ And she would introduce me to the nicest guys. ‘He’s got money,’ she would say. She was always as nice as she could be to me.”

In 1959, the Lenihans sold their home to build a smaller, more contemporary bungalow down the street at 10403 Edgewater Dr., across from their villa rental. Throughout construction, they lived in their Avon Lake rental, where Charlie unexpectedly collapsed and died of a massive heart attack on April 14, 1963. He was 63 years old.

Gloria slipped into deep mourning, her most faithful customers said. Rumors circulated that, for more than 30 years, she pinned Charlie’s suits, shirts and pairs of pants on a clothesline in the living room of her newly built home as a memorial to her late husband. Despite the loss of her husband, she reigned with an iron fist over the nightclub empire that she and Charlie built.

With her brother, Hank, as the manager of the Pickwood, Gloria commandeered the Cadillac until the fall of 1970, when she applied for a liquor license to move the club around the corner to 104 Prospect Ave. Her request to the state of Ohio proposed that she would relocate the bar next to the vacant Richman Brothers department store, in which a group of Italian nuns from the Daughters of St. Paul order planned to run a first-floor religious bookstore and chapel while they lived on the second floor.

Gloria’s application didn’t sit well with then-31st Ward Councilman Gerald McFaul, who would later serve as Cuyahoga County’s sheriff from 1977 until he resigned in disgrace over charges of corruption in early 2009. His protests helped block her petition. And she twice slammed down the telephone when a "Cleveland Press" reporter called to question her about McFaul’s disapproval. “I am looking ahead,” he told the newspaper at the time. “The nuns have spent a great sum of money on this project already. I’m not a Puritan, but I can’t have a bar next to a religious center. Common sense tells me another bar on Prospect would not be good for Cleveland.”

Gloria didn’t fight the challenge. She shuttered the Cadillac for good by the end of the year, putting an end to its 27-year run as Cleveland’s premier gay bar. But she was a far cry from going out of business since many of her regular patrons followed her to the Pickwood.

Remarkably smaller than the glitzy Cadillac, the Pickwood was actually two bars in one: a wood-paneled, European-style pub on one side of a dividing wall and an Art Deco-influenced piano lounge on the other. After 67-year-old Hank died on July 14, 1975, Gloria took over the responsibility of opening the pub during the day to a predominantly older, blue-collar clientele. At five o’clock sharp, she would order the bartender to ring out the cash register and announce that it was time for all the customers to move to the other side. That way, she could stay in the pub by herself and count the day’s take while she nursed an occasional stinger made with brandy and peppermint schnapps.

Not that many patrons minded the happy-hour move. The lounge was stunningly decorated, with black leather-padded booths, a black baby-grand piano and a priceless, vintage-1923 etching by Cleveland-born modernist painter August Biehle. The 5-foot-by-10-foot artwork attracted its fair share of attention because it depicted two nude women -- one standing, the other lying on the ground -- eating grapes beneath a waterfall.

After Gloria finished tallying the pub’s daily receipts, customers often found her sitting in a booth at the back of the lounge until closing time at 2:30 in the morning. Keeping with her ritual, she cast an eagle eye on the bartenders to make sure the club was running efficiently. “She had this ownership mentality, a mine personality,” said John Duhn, an interior-house painter who patronized the club in the early ‘80s. “You would hear her say to the bartender, ‘You made that drink too strong. You’re costing me money.’ She was that cheap. Her focus was cash, and she knew everything about anybody in that damn bar.”

Misbehaving barflies didn’t escape Gloria’s wrath, either. When she was forced to maneuver with a cane because of the osteoporosis that hunched her back, she turned the walking stick into a weapon when she saw someone break her foot-long rule. “If she started to see someone getting frisky, that cane came down on the bar,” remembered Bill Barry, a bail bondsman who frequented the club during Gloria’s last days of ownership. “She’d say, ‘This is not that kind of bar. This is a gentlemen’s bar.’”

She also could get feisty if anybody tinkered with her property. Take the time handyman Dave Masters and a buddy tried to pound out Broadway show tunes on the piano in the lounge. As Gloria sat in her booth, she glared at the duet until she couldn’t stand the music anymore. She then squeezed herself out of her seat and, with the cane to steady herself, walked over to the pair. “She said, “If I wanted you play my piano, I would have hired you,” Masters said. “I never went back.”

In the ‘80s, Patrick Anderson walked into Gloria’s life. The retired first-district police captain called himself “the prosecutor,” who protected her from customers who wanted to take advantage of her. On the other hand, some patrons called him “a weasel who wormed his way in and cleaned her out,” Duhn said. Perhaps. But in 1987, the 83-year-old Gloria -- riddled with cancer for which she had to wear a colostomy bag -- sold the club to Anderson, who renamed the bar North Coast Cabaret and catered to a straight crowd until he put the business on the market in 1992 and retired to Las Vegas, where he later died. “Gloria loved him,” insisted longtime customer Jimmy Roncalli, whose claim to fame was being the cousin of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli a.k.a. Pope John XXIII. “Pat told me himself that he got money from her. She was good in some ways. She wasn’t evil.”

Once in retirement, Gloria remained reclusive in her Edgewater Drive home. However, her aches and ailments became so profound that she needed round-the-clock care at St. Augustine Manor at 7901 Detroit Ave., where she died on Wednesday, June 22, 1994. Her memorial service was held three days later at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church on Detroit Avenue, where the Reverend Albert Veigas celebrated mass and praised Gloria for being a devout Catholic who made lasting financial contributions to the church. To the paltry attendance of 12 mourners, the service turned into a gigglefest because of Veigas’ thick Indian accent. “We didn’t understand a fucking thing he was saying,” said Roncalli, who sat in a pew “with two old drag queens and a bunch of nuns.” “Was he talking about Gloria or should we be singing ‘Gloria?’”

Forget about the singing. Gloria would have been crying in her casket if she knew about the relatively paltry sum of money she would leave to her heirs. After all the money she made in decades of owning successful nightclubs and restaurants and amassing an impressive list of real-estate holdings, the numbers spoke for themselves when Brecksville attorney William J. Day filed her will in Cuyahoga County Probate Court on August 8. It showed that someone had cleaned out most of her estate without leaving a paper trail.

Originally drafted on April 29, 1988, Gloria’s will named Anderson as its executor. It then allocated an off-the-top $10,000 bequeath to her longtime friend and Cleveland native Kenneth Ray Booth, an apartment-building manager who basked in his retirement in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. Finally, it divided the remainder of the estate into three parts: 40 percent to Gloria’s only niece, Mary Kate Stevens Sarles of Somerville, New Jersey; 30 percent to her sister-in-law, Catherine Stevens of Parma; and the last 30 percent to Anderson, who listed the Avon Lake house where Charlie died as his address. He also would profit from 500 shares each of common stock in Gloria’s North Coast and Reid Manor corporations, the entities that governed her bar and property-rental businesses. But by the time of her death, nobody bothered to update the will, and the stocks had no value since neither company no longer existed.

There were other glitches. On August 10, two days after the court filing, the 76-year-old Booth died at a medical center in Hollywood, Florida. A flurry of legal paperwork followed to transfer his $10,000 share to his nephews and nieces. Then, on January 27, 1995, Anderson announced, without explanation, that he was relinquishing his 30 percent share, giving up his rights as executor, and nominating Catherine Stevens as the estate’s administratrix.

Nearly a year passed before the truth emerged about Gloria’s near destitution. Her two most valuable assets consisted of $29,651.38 in her personal Society Bank checking account and 675 shares of Intercontinental Bank stock worth $18,812.13. Her only other holdings included 26 shares of stock worth $738 in the Cleveland-based greeting card giant, American Greetings; an undisclosed number of shares of Phoenix Investments stock that amounted to $380.09; and 540 worthless shares of stock in Carner Bank of Miami, which ultimately went bankrupt by 1994. Bottom line: The grand total of her estate amounted to a measly $49,581.60, a small fraction of the millions of dollars that flowed in and out of her hands throughout her business life.

Before the court disbursed any money to the beneficiaries, Gloria’s final expenses had to be paid. They included nearly $3,700 in medical bills from St. Augustine, Lakewood Hospital and a multitude of physicians. Her funeral cost $3,900, from a $1,272 coffin to $60 for tent rental at the burial service and $50 for a church organist. After the legal fees were paid, the estate was left with $31,002.31. Sarles collected $11,551.27, Stevens pocketed $9,451.04, and Booth’s family received the promised $10,000.

Years after Gloria’s death, even her most devoted customers chuckled about her final resting place at a Rocky River cemetery. That’s because the section in which she was buried bore the same name as a euphemism for low-income housing. “It’s kind of ironic and funny at the same time,” Roncolli said. “For all the money that women made in her lifetime that she would end up in Section 8.”

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Gloria Lenihan was buried in Section 8, Lot 188, Plot 4 at Lakewood Park Cemetery, 22025 Detroit Rd. in Rocky River. She was 90 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 6: Winsor French II

2010-06-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

Silver Spoons and Silver Clouds

Winsor French II
1904-1973

Downtown Cleveland’s jazz clubs teemed with late-night revelers, when pianist Dick Mone headlined entertainment bills in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Occasionally accompanied by a female singer, his smooth, soothing sets attracted a devoted fan base wherever he played from nine at night until two in the morning. His most faithful followers: The city’s gays and lesbians, who kept their social calendars flexible to catch Mone’s act at any minute. And their eyes were peeled for his schedule in Winsor French’s society columns in the "Cleveland Press." “I remember (Dick) changed from one bar to another,” groupie Leonard Delores recalled. “He had a gay following but it was a very subtle thing. And Winsor wrote up, ‘Well, the younger-than-springtime set was following Dick Mone.’”

A revered gossip reporter, Winsor commanded the written word, and his LGBT readers devoured every one of his columns. To describe Mone’s fan base, Winsor borrowed a line from a Rodgers & Hammerstein song in the 1949 Broadway hit, "South Pacific." “Younger than springtime are you/Gayer than laughter are you,” went the lyrics to “Younger Than Springtime,” in which an infatuated Lieutenant Joe Cable croons to the shy island girl, Liat. Most of the newspaper’s straight subscribers were clueless about the “younger-than-springtime” cryptogram; many of its gay and lesbian readers caught on to Winsor’s code phrase. However, unlike his enigmatic play on words, both his life and career were no mysteries.

Winsor Brown French II was born into a prosperous and prestigious family in Saratoga Springs, New York, on December 24, 1904, the third of four children to Winsor P. and Edith G. French. His Vermont-born, law school-educated grandfather, after whom he was named, enlisted in the U.S. Army on September 24, 1861, and served for the Union as a Civil War colonel of New York’s 77th regiment. He ultimately was promoted to brigadier general of American volunteer troops a month before the war ended on April 9, 1865.

After General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate troops at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, the elder Winsor returned to his Saratoga Springs home to partner with a couple of fellow attorneys to establish the Ponds, French & Brackett law firm in the city’s town hall. Saratoga County voters then elected him their district attorney for a one-year term in 1868. He also fathered three children: Emma in 1870, Georgina in 1873 and Winsor P. in 1875. And he later served as a New York delegate at the 1896 Republican National Convention to nominate Niles native William McKinley for president.

In his spare time, Winsor held a seat on the executive committee of the Saratoga Humane Society. And from February of 1899 to June of 1903, he held the position of postmaster-general of the Saratoga Springs Post Office. He spent his final years on a farm he purchased in the neighboring rural village of Wilton, where he died on March 24, 1910, at the age of 77.

Winsor’s only son followed in his footsteps. Winsor P. served in the 201st Infantry during the Spanish-American War before returning home to marry Edith in 1899. They settled into a home near his dad’s law firm, and he founded his own legal practice in town.

Winsor and Edith eventually started a family with the birth of their first of two daughters, Edith, in 1901. They then welcomed into the fold Caroline “Carol” Winsor in 1902, Winsor Brown II in 1904 and Edward in 1908. Between the births of their two sons, Edith tried her hand at acting on the Broadway stage in the spring of 1905. She first appeared in Augustus Thomas’ "The Education of Mr. Pipp" at the Liberty Theatre on West 42nd street, then Paul Armstrong’s "The Heir to the Hoorah" at the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street. But tragedy loomed on the horizon.

To say the least, the 32-year-old’s Winsor P.’s sudden death in 1908 rocked the family’s foundation. Edith packed up her children and belongings and moved to neighboring Rensselaer County on the New York-Massachusetts border. In the county seat of Troy, the family lived in a row house at 44 Second St. next to a white-marble, Federal-style house built in 1827 by one of New York City’s leading bankers, William Howard, for his only daughter, Betsey, and her husband, Richard P. Hart, who was president of Troy Savings Bank. By the time Edith and her kids moved in, their next-door neighbor was Mary A. Cluett, the 51-year-old widow of George B. Cluett, who helped found Cluett, Peabody and Company, a manufacturer of shirts and collars. The business helped give Troy its nickname, “the Collar City.”

Edith kept her home running smoothly by hiring Irish-born Agnes Walsh as the family’s live-in cook; Agnes’ daughter, Nora, as their maid; and local nurse Mary Henry as the children’s nanny. But in 1910, she married 37-year-old Joseph Oriel Eaton II and moved her family to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where her new husband co-owned a company that manufactured patented truck axles. The couple quickly added to Ethel’s brood from her first marriage with the births of Joseph Jr. in 1911 and Margaret in 1914.

Joseph’s firm relocated to a plant at 1115 E. 152nd Street in Cleveland in 1917 to be closer to its primary clients in the automotive industry. But after a succession of buyouts by the business’ own customers, Eaton bowed out of the corporation the following year and started his own axle-manufacturing company at 10017 Euclid Ave.

The decision ultimately proved profitable. Eaton’s business philosophy centered on buying other companies within the automobile sector to make his empire grow at its East Side headquarters. One acquisition after another led to his enterprise going global in 1937, when he built a manufacturing plant in Canada. But his death in 1949 would prevent him from witnessing his company’s impressive performance in 2008, when the Eaton Corporation ranked 154th on the Fortune 500 list with sales topping $15.4 billion in 150 countries. “You couldn’t have worked for a better man,” one of his former workers said after Joseph was posthumously inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1983.

The Eaton family’s ballooning fortune allowed for luxurious trappings, such as private tutors and maids in their spacious first home at 2193 Harcourt Dr. north of Rockefeller Park in Cleveland Heights. Edith also gave birth to the couple’s two youngest children, Martha in 1918 and Anne in 1919, the same year the family moved to an even larger home at 2207 Devonshire Rd. north of Cedar Road.

As the elder stepson, Winsor wasn’t shy at taking advantage of the Eaton wealth throughout the roaring ‘20s. While he failed miserably in classes at both Kenyon College in Gambier and at his stepfather’s alma mater, Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he adored frequent Atlantic Ocean voyages aboard the RMS Aquitania and the SS Mauritania to the port of Cherbourg, France, to hobnob with the continental elite. He also discovered his passion for writing about his international travels on postcards to his family and friends in the States.

Once he was back in Cleveland, Winsor jumped on his newfound talent to team with 25-year-old buddy and polo-playing fanatic W. Holden White to publish the first issue of "Parade" on June 11, 1931. The weekly magazine spotlighted “social, semi-humorous and pictorial” sketches of Cleveland’s people, places and events. Sporadically placed within the pages was a series of boxed questions, like “Who is the minister who has the most complete collection of pornography in the city?” The unanswered queries added to the magazine’s allure.

Winsor’s debut article, “The Melancholy Tale of Moser’s,“ recanted the story of the defunct Cheese Club, whose members had met every Friday night since 1896 for beer, cheese and debate at Otto Moser’s sandwich bar on East Fourth Street. The gatherings folded at the dawn of Prohibition in 1929. “Whisky was forbidden; it wrecked conversation and started fights,” Winsor reported about the group’s heyday. “The meetings were almost always exclusively male as the conversation was considered a bit too risqué for the ladies of the drama.”

With Jerome Brainerd Zerbe Jr. as its chief photographer and art director, the periodical scored praise from "Time" magazine, whose reviewer wrote that the premier issue “easily equaled 'Town & Country.'” The critic also mentioned that Cleveland was a “scene of such dithering excitement” that a bunch of amateur journalists could churn out a high-quality rag. However, "Parade" ceased publication in 1933 because of mounting production costs in the midst of the Great Depression. Nevertheless, Winsor had established himself as a formidable society reporter. His reputation was not lost on the "Cleveland Press," whose editors immediately hired him to cover the city’s entertainment beat.

But Winsor carved out more ambitious plans for both the newspaper and himself. He offered to traipse around the world at his expense and dispatch stories to the newsroom about all the beautiful people with whom he socialized. The assignments frequently took him to London, Paris and Venice. He made regular treks to New York City to immerse himself in its theatrical world. He also chummed around with his collection of gay comrades, including Cleveland philanthropist Leonard Hanna, composer Cole Porter and actor Monty Woolley, all of whom he met at the parties he chronicled in his society column.

But like most gay men of his generation, Winsor concealed his sexual orientation by asking a woman to marry him. His choice of bride: The ravishing 20-year-old actress Margaret Hall Frueauff, who was billed on the New York stage as Margaret Perry. The elder of two daughters of the late Denver utilities magnate Frank A. Frueauff and respected Broadway director Antoinette Perry (after whom the theater world’s most treasured award, the Tony, would be named), Margaret extravagantly lived on her inherited wealth. She enjoyed a $2,225 monthly allowance from her trust fund. And when she turned 21 on February 23, 1934, she was eligible to cash in on the $675,259.93 that her father bequeathed to her in his will before his death in 1922.

Winsor and Margaret married in a lavish Big Apple wedding ceremony on October 7, 1933. The extravaganza made front-page headlines in all of Cleveland’s newspapers. And no expense was spared after a surrogate judge approved an $18,851 advance from Margaret’s inheritance. The wedding bills included $7,480 for her trousseau, $1,850 for flowers and decorations, $1,606 for refreshments, $1,500 for a chauffeur-driven limousine and $1,000 for the couple’s honeymoon, which they wouldn’t take until a year later.

The newly betrothed Frenches made their home in a suite of rooms at the Eatons’ Devonshire Drive estate. With Margaret’s resume loaded with glowing reviews as the leading lady in her mother’s Broadway production of "Strictly Dishonorable," she landed a plum role in an extended-run presentation of "Criminal at Large" at the Cleveland Play House.

Winsor, meanwhile, continued to work the society beat for the "Press." For most of 1934, he stayed close to home, unearthing pockets of Cleveland that usually didn’t garner much publicity. For example, his August 25 column trumpeted a clambake in the newly revitalized “Little Hollywood” neighborhood on Hough Avenue between East 71st and East 97th streets. In his report, he described a row of “little shops that have stood empty for years are blossoming forth with new coats of paint and fancy names.” There was the Midnite Frolic, a nightclub in which patrons couldn’t enter unless they produced 25-cent membership cards to the doorman. At the Ritz Grill, fair-haired waitresses with “pleasantly insinuating eyes” politely took orders while diners often broke into song and dance at their tables. “It is a gay, colorful jumble,” Winsor wrote. “The bands start tuning up as soon as it grows dark and continue until long after dawn. And the aimless crowd wandering from door to door looks more like the nightly parade of Paris’ Montmartre than anything Cleveland has seen in a long, long time.”

But the French marriage started to unravel as soon as the “I do’s” were spoken. Ostensibly, Winsor’s homosexuality exacerbated the union’s quick disintegration. On vacation in Europe to celebrate their first anniversary, the couple agreed to part ways. In early December of 1934, Margaret flew to Reno for a quickie divorce, citing “mental cruelty” for the marital breakdown. She would later marry actor Burgess Meredith, then motion-picture art director Paul Fanning, with whom she had two sons and two daughters. She subsequently retired from acting and died on April 8, 2007, at the age of 94 on her family’s Salt Works Ranch in South Park, Colorado, west of Colorado Springs.

Winsor sought consolation from gay friends for his failed marriage. He and his longtime confidant, Leonard Hanna, eventually became lovers in a relationship that would last until Leonard’s death in 1957. The relationship was well-known in their social circles. During a party at gay actor Clifton Webb’s home in Beverly Hills, "Gone With the Wind" screenwriter Sidney Howard asked Leonard, “Whatever became of that dreadful fairy who married Margaret Perry?” Winsor overhead the question and asked Howard to repeat it. Indignantly, he told the Oscar winner, “I am that dreadful fairy,” to which Howard sniffed, “Well, whatever became of you?”

The truth was that Winsor had become a household name in Cleveland. His newspaper columns about his international travels were must-reads for subscribers. Accounts of New York parties with movie stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead and Clark Gable riveted readers. And Cole Porter remained a frequent subject of his columns throughout most of Winsor’s career. “In every way, Porter was probably the most brilliant, gifted and witty music maker of our time,” he wrote in a February 3, 1965, tribute that was published four months after the songwriter’s death. “He knew exactly what he was doing and what effects he hoped to achieve. Almost always, his compositions were tailor-made for singers whose voices he knew and appreciated.”

Winsor’s voyages to and from Europe aboard steamliners like the "Queen Elizabeth," the "Santa Paula" and the "Ile de France" also gave his fans a taste of the charmed life of café society. But his traveling tips often made the average Joe’s eyebrows arch. “To charter a yacht is not nearly as fracturing as you’d think,” he wrote. “They come from $250 a day on up.”

Winsor even made slice-of-life descriptions of road trips from New England to New York City seem thrilling. Take the time in the fall of 1952, when he drove from his beloved Williamstown to midtown Manhattan. “(There are) the jaywalkers who dart from behind parked trucks, the shouting taxi drivers, and the harried pedestrians looking as if they were late for their psychiatrists,” he wrote. “The entire scene is rather like a macabre Agnes de Mille ballet and a very strange contrast to the serenity of New England I had just left.”

Winsor turned heads in the summer of 1962, when he became the only working journalist in Cleveland wealthy enough to buy a Rolls-Royce. But the purchase of the sleek Silver Cloud model didn’t come without its headaches. On the day he had it imported it from England, the International Longshoremen’s Association refused to unload it from the boat in New York Harbor because its members had gone on strike. The car was then shipped back to Southhampton and left aboard the ocean liner until the next voyage across the Atlantic.

With outstretched arms, Winsor watched the ship sail into New York Harbor aa second time, only to learn that the union hadn’t resolved its labor dispute. So the Silver Cloud again went back to England. After a third trip to New York once the strike ended, he finally claimed his coveted set of wheels. But his troubles were far from over. “It was bad enough that the Rolls had been trapped in the hold of an ocean ship for so long,” "Plain Dealer" columnist George E. Condon wrote in March of 1980. “But it was a real crusher when French learned that it had been necessary to fumigate his glistening Rolls to rid the car of the boll weevils, stray tarantulas and whatever other vermin may be found in the cargo hold.”

Soon after Winsor drove the car to Cleveland, a crippling disease started to make it difficult for him to walk. At 58, he hired a chauffeur named Sam to drive him around town, including to his office at the "Press." Imagine the looks on co-workers’ faces during their own four-month-long strike in the spring of 1963, when Sam -- with his employer in the back seat -- drove into the newspaper’s parking lot so Winsor could pick up his mail. At the same time, editor Louis B. Seltzer was exiting the lot in his ho-hum Ford. The picketers cheered their fellow union brother as the boss swung out of the lot.

Winsor’s subsequent use of a wheelchair armed with a bicycle bell prompted him to lobby Mayor Ralph Locher, who ordered City Council to make all of Cleveland’s public buildings handicapped-accessible. Lyndon Johnson consequently awarded Winsor a presidential citation in 1966 for his work on behalf of the disabled.

But the inevitable came a couple of years later. Unable to comfortably roll his wheelchair around the newsroom, the 64-year-old Winsor retired from a career that gave him carte-blanche access to the rich and famous. For the rest of his days, he lived as a recluse in his apartment at 13900 Shaker Blvd. among his rare books, priceless antiques and autographed snapshots of celebrity friends.

On Tuesday, March 6, 1973, Winsor died in the bed to which he had been confined for months. An afternoon memorial service was held a couple of days later at St. Paul Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. In his will, he asked to be buried in his stepfather’s family plot in the Berkshires of extreme Northwestern Massachusetts. His death triggered a series of published homages from colleagues for years to come. “Whatever grievances his column expressed inclined toward deploring the wine list at a fancy restaurant in Paris or maybe the fading elegance of St. Tropez, not the kind of issues likely to bring the ordinary taxpayer into the street bearing banners of protest,” "Press" columnist Bob August opined in the Sept. 18, 1979, issue.

In the newspaper’s final edition on June 17, 1982, Dick Feagler recapped part of his own journalism career with a couple of paragraphs devoted to Winsor, who often infuriated co-worker Bill Rice for stories about his overseas jaunts. The feature writer would scream, “Goddammit, French. Everybody isn’t in Europe! I’m not in Europe!” Feagler’s column also brought up the fabled Silver Cloud that had caused Winsor so much trouble after he bought it. “When French died, we heard Sam got the Rolls,” he wrote. “We didn’t check it because we wanted it to be true. Memories are what you want them to be.”

Winsor’s name lived on more than two decades after his death, when, on July 8, 1995, the Wyndham Cleveland Play House Square Hotel on Euclid Avenue unveiled its new restaurant, Winsor’s. Fittingly, the writer’s own 1920s-style caricatures of movie stars, stage actors and musicians lined the walls. And the menu depicted fine, upscale cuisine like rack of lamb, turkey medallions and bacon-wrapped tenderloin that Winsor savored in his worldly travels. Fayette Hickox -- the son of Winsor’s half-sister, Martha -- paid tribute to his uncle to news reporters after the restaurant’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. “His byline was as likely to come from Paris as from Cleveland,” he said. “He told his editor he was going to do updates on life in Europe. But rather than write about the Marshall Plan and people living on rations, he would report on what Noel Coward said last night at dinner. He was one of the bright, young things of Cleveland.”

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Winsor French was buried in Section C, Plot 836 of the Eaton Family Lot at Westlawn Cemetery on Sabin Drive off Cold Spring Road in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He was 68 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 7: Philip Johnson

2010-06-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

In a House of Glass

Philip Johnson
1906-2005

David Whitney sprinted across the Rhode Island School of Design campus to a lecture hall at the adjacent Brown University in Providence. In the fall of 1960, not many chances came along for an aspiring 21-year-old designer to listen to one of the most preeminent architects in the United States. The thought of being in the same room with Philip Johnson -- the mastermind behind the infamous “Glass House” -- was the thrill of a lifetime for the Massachusetts native.

When Philip -- wearing his trademark, black-rimmed eyeglasses -- finished his speech, David approached the 54-year-old master at the lecturn. A quick introduction segued to his bold request to tour the one-of-a-kind house that Philip built for himself. Flattered and bemused, the legendary architect acquiesced. David found himself in New Canaan, Connecticut, the following weekend, with his hero escorting him on a guided walk-through of the house. Their time spent together marked the beginning of an unlikely romance between an infatuated college senior and a mentor 33 years older, whose path to international acclaim began in Northeast Ohio.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, the third of four children of the gregarious lawyer, Homer Hosea, and his refined, sophisticated third wife, Louise Pope Johnson. He could trace his Ohio roots to a 3,000-acre farm on Main Street in the rural Huron County village of New London, where his paternal great -grandfather, the Massachusetts-born Hosea Townsend, settled in the Western Reserve in 1815. The family also boasted of its genealogical link to the 17th-century surveyor Jacques Cortelyou, who, in 1660, drew the first street plan of New Amsterdam, which later was renamed New York City. Louise, meanwhile, was born into a well-to-do Cleveland family that built its wealth in the shipping industry.

Homer, who was born in 1862 at Townsend Farms, studied classical literature for two years at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Two years later, he transferred closer to home to Oberlin College in Lorain County, where he pledged membership in the Phi Delta fraternity and graduated in 1885. He earned his law degree summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1888, the same year he married his college sweetheart, Janet “Nettie” Whitcomb, who would die of tuberculosis a couple of years later. He walked down the aisle a second time in 1896 to marry Elizabeth Gertrude Beggs, who succumbed to pneumonia just two months later while the couple honeymooned in Europe. The twice-widowed Homer’s third marriage, to Louise, in 1901 lasted nearly 56 years until her death at 89 years old on November 9, 1957.

The Johnsons quickly started a family with the birth of their oldest child, Jeanette, on June 26, 1902. Their first son, Alfred Pope, died of mastoiditis -- or a middle-ear infection -- soon after he was born on June 18, 1903. Philip arrived three years later, with a second daughter, Theodate, completing the brood on August 13, 1907. Like most upper-class women raised in the Victorian Age, Louise, an 1891 Wellesley College graduate, made sure her children were well-versed in literature, fine arts and European architecture. Her first cousin, Theodate Pope Riddle, undoubtedly helped educate the kids in the last discipline since she was one of the country’s first female architects, concentrating on the design of country homes and private schools on the Eastern seaboard.

Homer and Louise reared their family in a spacious Tudor-style home at 2171 Overlook Rd. in Cleveland Heights, where a German-born governess, Emma Saudr, taught the children her native language. A couple of maids, Augusta Erieson and Elizabeth Eugstrom, also waited on the kids, while Homer and his unrelated Oberlin College classmate, Blake Johnson, managed a thriving law firm that specialized in trusts and wills in the Union Trust Building in downtown Cleveland. Homer also joined several country clubs to pad his client base. “He liked to claim that he got more new legal business in the locker rooms than he ever could sitting in his office," Philip’s 98-year-old sister, Jeanette Johnson Dempsey, told biographer Frank D. Welch in 2000.

Away from the office, Homer established himself as a civic leader. He sat on the boards of directors of both the Cleveland School of Art and Chamber of Commerce. He taught classes on constitutional law at Western Reserve University from 1892 to 1917. Between 1900 and 1924, he was a trustee at his alma mater, Oberlin College, where he was instrumental in helping to develop the school’s massive art collection and secure financing to build its glorious concert hall, Finney Chapel. Meantime, Louise kept busy with her volunteerism on the advisory council of the Cleveland Museum of Art and as a member of the Cleveland Women’s City Club.

Every weekend during the summer, the clan made the 60-mile trek westward to Townsend Farms and its two-story, white-frame main house. The children passed away the time with frequent fishing and horseback-riding expeditions. The family also wintered in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where Homer golfed and Louise gave art lectures to the community. And they periodically sailed to Europe, where Louise introduced her children to fine living and dining in France, Germany and Switzerland. Philip, in particular, proved to be gifted in the arts, a trait that his mother relished. “On Sundays in Cleveland, Mother would conduct slide-illustrated seminars on art and architecture, including the modern stuff, for Philip, Theodate and me in the living room,” Jeanette told Welch. “Philip just soaked it up. His aptitude for the arts was pretty clear to Mother very early.”

In 1924, a year after Philip graduated as the salutatorian of his class from the exclusive all-boys’ college-prep academy, the Hackley School, in Tarrytown, New York, Homer surprised his three surviving children with early inheritances. He bequeathed prime downtown Cleveland real estate to each of his daughters. Philip scored a substantial number of shares of stock in the Pittsburgh-based Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, a company that his dad’s college buddy, Charles Martin Hall, founded in 1888 after discovering the process to smelt aluminum. Homer’s investment in the business made Philip an instant millionaire nearly 40 years later.

But the roaring ‘20s was a decade of uncertainty and restlessness for Philip. He floated in and out of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, blaming his homosexuality on a nervous breakdown in 1925 that delayed him from earning a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy until he was nearly 24 years old. When he wasn’t enrolled in classes, he traveled to Germany, where he met acclaimed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was hailed as a pioneer in architectural modernism. The formidable designer’s expertise influenced and challenged him for the rest of his life. While criss-crossing Europe, Philip also experimented with gay sex. Years later, he joked that, aside from the German lessons from his governess as a youngster, he learned the language “in the horizontal method” from native men.

After graduation, Philip immediately accepted a job as the first director of the Department of Architecture at New York’s two-year-old Museum of Modern Art, an institution that trumpeted its holdings as “the art of now.” In the position, he helped organize the 1932 exhibit, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, featuring the American debuts of the latest architectural-design trends by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Frank Lloyd Wright made waves prior to the display’s opening, when he withdrew from the line-up because he didn’t think the museum would more prominently showcase him among the other designers.

Philip returned to Germany that summer to vacation with Helen Applegate Read, a New York art critic who arranged for the pair to attend a Nazi Party rally in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, where dictator Adolf Hitler spoke about national socialism and anti-Semitism. To say the gathering impressed Philip was an understatement. The precise marching drills of the German military’s finest-looking soldiers alone was enough to make him swoon. His Jewish friends in New York thought “his wires got crossed,” when he returned to the States.

Philip’s obsession with the Nazi movement prompted his abrupt resignation from MoMA shortly before Christmas of 1934. He and Harvard chum Alan Blackburn then began to organize the Young Nationalist Party, a right-wing political organization that espoused radical populist policies. The men drove to Louisiana to gain support from Democratic U.S. Senator Huey P. Long, a “down-home fascist” whose Share the Wealth campaign that year lobbied for financial equality for all Americans in order to fend off poverty and crime. “It was the depths of the Depression,” Philip recalled decades later. “The country was going to pot, and no one could do anything about it. (President Franklin Roosevelt) seemed powerless. People were hungry on the streets of the richest country in the world. It was absurd.”

But when Long refused to meet with the wannabe activists, Blackburn returned to New York, while Philip retreated to Townsend Farms. He established residency, won a seat on New London’s parks board and helped set up a dairy farmers’ strike to protest the wholesale cost of milk. He also contemplated a run for Ohio’s House of Representatives but quickly nixed the idea. Consequently, he and Blackburn agreed to disband their party.

Philip briefly returned to Germany in 1939 as a journalist to cover such newsworthy events as the annual Nuremburg Rally, where the Nazis convened to bolster their party’s ego. He also witnessed the German-Soviet-Slovak invasion of Poland in 1939 that marked the start of the British-French invasion of Germany and World War II. “The German green uniforms made the place look happy and gay,“ he dispatched from the frontlines to some of America’s socialist newspapers. “There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being burned. It was a stirring spectacle.”

The sight also left Philip both upset and disgusted. He returned to the U.S. and immediately signed up for a two-year enlistment in the Army. While his stint was uneventful, it helped to change his outlook on Hitler’s Holocaustic mission for a “New-World order.” “I have no excuse. Such utter stupidity,” he famously said years later about his attraction to Nazi Germany. “I don’t know how you expiate guilt.”

Colleagues eventually forgave Philip for the pro-socialist viewpoints for which he argued during the latter half of the ‘30s. He, however, never apologized for the beliefs he held at the time. “When Johnson did come to -- seeing Hitler for the evil he was -- he quickly turned away from politics,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of Yale University’s School of Architecture, in a 2005 essay for the trade journal, "Architectural Record." “Johnson’s misadventures of the 1930s need to be seen against a broader canvas of the times and in light of all sorts of demons that plagued him then.”

Coming to his senses, Philip enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1941 to study the career that would make him world-renowned: architecture. While renting a two-story house on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, he worked on his dissertation for a master’s degree by designing and building a home for himself on Ash Street. Completed the following year, the house attracted undergraduate architecture majors, such as I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph and Edward Larrabee Barnes, to inspect and marvel at the wood-framed structure with one wall made of glass into which many guests crashed. “Damn fool!” Philip grumbled every time it happened. He sold the house in 1943 for $24,000, the same amount of money he invested from his personal wealth to build it.

Philip went back to New York and his position at MoMA in 1946 after a post-Harvard stint with the Army Corps of Engineers. His return resurrected his quest to introduce new architectural styles to the general public. “We all agreed, all us young architects, that our so-called modern architecture was too old and icy and flat,” he said on the day after his 90th birthday in 1996 to correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault on the PBS program, "Newshour With Jim Lehrer." “Frank Lloyd Wright used to call it flat-chested -- no breasts -- because it was all sheer and smooth with glass up to the top, and the top cut off, and it didn’t seem human.”

Philip and grad-school classmate Landes Gores set up a private practice the following year in a small apartment on Lexington Avenue, where they dedicated their work to designs of private homes. But they butted heads with the law four years later, when New York authorities discovered the pair conducting business without a state-approved license. So the partners packed up their office belongings and relocated to a two-story storefront 100 miles across the Connecticut border in the reserved, WASP-ish hamlet of New Canaan in Fairfield County. Philip then set out to construct his own home on the one and only parcel of land a real-estate agent showed him: a five-acre plot on a bluff that overlooked a pond at 199 Elm St.

Nearly 80 schematic designs later, Philip selected a plan that featured a 1,700-square-foot glass house that was supported by eight steel beams and sat on a brick platform. In the blueprints, he devoted space to a brick guest house that would face the main structure 30 yards away. His plans also called for a long, winding driveway that led to the roadside, where a stone wall would hide the two structures from view. After nearly a year of construction, Philip moved into his house of glass on New Year’s Eve of 1948.

Applauded for its minimal structure and elements of geometry, proportion, reflection and transparency, the main house was anchored by a centrally placed living room, in which its only furnishings included a chaise lounge, glass coffee table, a couple of deck chairs and a single painting. The corner bedroom -- separated from the rest of the house by a six-foot-high wall of walnut cabinetry -- took up about a third of the living space. In another corner, the kitchen contained a simple L-shaped counter, with all the appliances stored in cupboards below. The dining room occupied a third corner. The only encased part of the house was the aquamarine-tiled bathroom that was shielded by a floor-to-ceiling brick cylinder.

To armchair architects in 1949, the aptly named Glass House represented a new dimension in design. Philip allowed it to be on a fundraising tour of seven homes in the neighborhood that spring. House & Garden magazine even devoted a 10-page spread of it in its October issue. And for years afterward, its owner invited the country’s leading architects, artists and designers of the latter half of the 20th century to convene at the house for an ongoing series of intellectual conversations, or “salons.” The Johnson name became synonymous with ingenuity and innovation for which new clients suddenly clamored.

One of Philip’s first projects of 1950 took him to Houston, where banker John de Menil and his socialite wife, Dominique, hired him to conceive a blueprint for Texas’ first-ever “International-style” residence in which the couple would live. Popular in early-20th century Europe, the contemporary design featured a form-follows-function flair. And Philip was more than happy to oblige. “I like Houston. It's the last, great 19th-century city,” he told a Financial Times reporter in June of 1989. “Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.”

While he designed several homes throughout the United States, Philip simultaneously oversaw construction of MoMA’s west wing in 1951 and sculpture garden in 1953. He then resigned again from the museum a year later to focus on the design of commercial properties.

To silently atone for his actions in Germany two decades beforehand, Philip donated his expertise in 1956 to overhaul Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Port Chester, New York. He then teamed with Mies van der Rohe in 1956 to construct a 515-foot-tall, bronze-and-glass skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan. Two years later, the 39-story Seagram Building at 375 Park Ave. was unveiled as the headquarters of the Canadian distiller, Joseph Seagram & Sons.

The project, which "The New York Times" proclaimed as the most important building of the 20th century, was a study in corporate modernism. It also drummed up more commissions for Philip, from the 1959 design of the Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor of the Seagram to the 1960 expansion of St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, D.C. To Philip, architecture mirrored art. And sometimes, it fostered frustration. “The painters have every advantage over us today,“ he wrote in his contribution to the 1966 book, Architects on Architecture: New Directions in America. “Besides being able to tear up their failures -- we never can seem to grow ivy fast enough -- their materials cost them nothing. They have no committees of laymen telling them what to do. They have no deadlines, no budgets. We are all sickeningly familiar with the final cuts to our plans at the last moment. Why not take out the landscaping, the retaining walls, the colonnades? The building would be just as useful and much cheaper. True, an architect leads a hard life -- for an artist.”

Philip savored any chance to pass on words of wisdom to young, budding architects. Nearly every day at lunchtime, Four Seasons patrons saw him hold court at a corner table in the restaurant’s Grill Room, where he regaled students with war stories from the architectural front. He also continued to work the lecture circuit on college campuses, where, after a 1960 speech at Brown University, he met a college senior who would become his longtime life partner.

David Grainger Whitney was born in March of 1939, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The son of a prominent banker, he once acerbically told a reporter that his family was “of absolutely no interest whatsoever.” His sardonic wit, coupled with a zeal for art and architecture, immediately captivated Philip. Not long after their first rendezvous at the Glass House, David commuted between Providence and New Canaan to spend every weekend with his much older paramour while he finished his senior year at the Rhode Island School of Design. “I was just legal,” he quipped about the 33-year age difference between him and Philip.

David graduated in late spring of 1961, and Philip pulled strings to get his lover a job as a MoMA curator. David also organized exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a well-regarded institution founded in 1918 by sculptor and art doyenne Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to whom he was not related. David quickly made an impression with the museum’s members, who flocked to art displays he organized of pieces by pop-art icons like Cy Twombley and Jasper Johns. Andy Warhol also forged a friendship with both Philip and David that remained tight until the artist’s sudden death on February 22, 1987, after a routine gallbladder operation.

Tongues also wagged over David’s appearances at “happenings,” a see-and-be-seen series of social events at which New York’s elite on the Upper East Side converged to scrutinize art-exhibit debuts in the oddest places. There was the time in May of 1965 at the Claes Oldenburg display, "Washes," at Al Roon’s Health Club. Located in the basement of the Riverside Plaza Hotel, the spa featured a swimming pool, where David proceeded to shed his business suit and walk naked past the guests. “Everybody wanted to be a star,” he said afterward. “So I decided to upstage them and take my clothes off.”

Meanwhile, Philip and his new “Mrs. Johnson,” as he jokingly nicknamed David, maintained an East 52nd Street townhouse that originally had been designed as a guest house for philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III. And in New Canaan, they began to buy land abutting the Glass House, where they added a lake pavilion in 1962 and a painting gallery in 1965 to the compound. They also amassed a collection of antique furnishings and fine art, from Federal-style pine tables and hooked rugs to priceless George Ohr pottery and Willem de Kooning oil paintings. David, a lifelong green thumb, also took care of the estate’s sculpted landscapes and peony gardens.

In 1967, Philip teamed with the Notre Dame-educated John Burgee to found Johnson/Burgee Architects, a firm that would provide the most productive era of their careers. Projects ranged from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza in Dallas in 1970 to the pink-granite addition, the Johnson Building, at Boston Public Library in 1973. The IDS Center in Minneapolis, the Pennzoil Place in Houston and AT&T’s headquarters in New York all became treasured landmarks because of the partners’ collaborations.

The American Institute of Architecture recognized Philip’s lifetime of work and awarded him its gold medal in 1978. The following year, the Hyatt Foundation bestowed upon him the first-ever Pritzker Architecture Prize to “a living architect whose work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment.” The award, which the industry described as its “Nobel prize of architecture,” also came with a $100,000 check for Philip. “I am a whore,” he told reporters in 1985. “I am paid very well for high-rise buildings.”

Philip’s most ambitious design, however, was commissioned in 1980, when televangelist Robert H. Schuller hired him and Burgee to build his Crystal Cathedral in the Los Angeles suburb of Garden Grove. Made with 10,000 rectangular panes of glass, the 2,900-seat megachurch cost $17 million to erect. Its sturdy construction also guaranteed that the building could withstand an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale. “This may be it for me,” Philip said, after a journalist asked him to rank the project on a list of his largest-scale ventures.

In 1983, Philip finally was hired to help oversee a project in his hometown. The Cleveland Play House had just closed its East 77th Street Theater eight blocks from its Euclid Avenue headquarters. To replace the shuttered performance space, the organization called on Philip to design a sister stage to its existing Drury Theater. The result: the 558-seat Bolton Theater, with an accompanying rotunda lobby in a neo-Byzantine style. The expansion made the Play House the largest regional theater in the U.S.

But of the most-analyzed Johnson/Burgee projects, the “Lipstick Building,” at 885 Third Ave. in Manhattan continually attracted a litany of critiques after its completion in 1986. With an elliptical shape that resembled a tube of lipstick, the steel-and-red granite building stood 34 stories tall, with the Latham & Watkins law firm occupying the vast majority of office space. (The structure made national headlines in 2008, when a $65 billion Ponzi scheme unraveled between the 17th and 19th floors in the offices of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. Its 70-year-old founder subsequently was sentenced to a maximum 150-year sentence in federal prison for orchestrating the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history.)

The Johnson-Burgee team also became one of the building’s tenants after it was built. But the move was ill-fated. Burgee, as the firm’s chief executive officer by contract, craved more attention. So he immediately demoted Philip to the less important role of “design consultant.” And in 1991, he eased his 85-year-old partner out of the company altogether.

By this time, Philip and David had made their home base in a stunningly appointed apartment in the Museum Tower above MoMA. They also continued to add to their Glass House compound, with the construction of a sculpture gallery in 1970, a library-and-study combo in 1980 and the all-glass “Ghost House” in 1984, which Philip described as “the spirit” of the estate. David also bought both the neighboring Calluna Farms and the Grainger House across the street in 1980 to expand their real-estate portfolio to an impressive 47 acres. The couple then made a 1986 commitment to bequeath the house and its additions to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to maintain after their deaths.

Philip then arranged to build a final attraction to the property in 1995, when he named a proposed visitors’ center, “Da Monsta,” in tribute to the burgeoning hip-hop musical movement of the decade. Designed in his signature post-Modernist style, the building is a three-dimensional network of wires that were coated in a sandwich of plaster on the inside, Styrofoam in the center and concrete on the outside.

Philip also continued to accept new projects, now that he was an independent consultant. He returned to Cleveland again in 1996 to help design the “Turning Point” display on the Case Western Reserve University campus. Described by many spectators as a “mini-Stonehenge,” the exhibit consisted of five sculptures that stood in the shadows of the Peter B. Lewis Building, where pedestrian traffic suddenly shifted from north to northeast near Bellflower Road. When the college added a garden, Philip spoke at its dedication on April 27, 2001. “This is an enormous kick of pleasure for me,” he told the audience. “This is the most important statement in art that I’ve ever been able to make. I’m just delighted with the results, and all you can do is crow, which is not very dignified.”

Once he turned 90 in 1996, Philip limited his choice of outside projects. His final two major drawings included the Philip-Johnson-Haus in Berlin in 1997, when he designed a retail-and-office complex near the former Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous crossing point between East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. And in 2001, he drew the blueprints for the First Union Plaza, a mix of commercial and residential space on 4.1 acres in the heart of Boca Raton, Florida.

Its completion marked the start of Philip’s final years of relative idleness. On Tuesday, January 25, 2005, he peacefully died of natural causes at his beloved Glass House. David, who had been diagnosed with lung and bone cancer, passed away five months later on Sunday, June 12, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on East 68th Street. He was 66 years old.

Along with the 1986 Glass House donation to the National Trust of Historic Preservation, Philip bequeathed an $8 million endowment to the agency for the costs of the estate’s upkeep. David’s will then directed Sotheby’s to auction off the couple’s mammoth collection of artwork, antiques and collectibles from four properties: the Glass and Grainger houses, the Manhattan apartment and an oceanfront ranch house in Big Sur, California, that David himself had bought in 2000.

On November 16, 2007, nearly 300 lots of belongings went on the auction block at "An American Visionary: The Collection of David Whitney." A small crowd of potential buyers showed up at Sotheby’s to compete with a full bank of telephone bidders with deep pockets.

While a George Ohr vase went for $132,000 and a slate cup by Kenneth Price sold for $228,000, the highest bids pored in for the Warhol memorabilia that the artist gave to Philip and David during their two-decade friendship. A 1972 Christmas present of a 10-inch-by-12-inch acrylic-and-silkscreen of the late Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung snagged the highest bid of the day at $2.25 million, or 10 times its appraised value. And a silkscreen of Warhol’s mother, Julia, also brought a sweet bid of $1.3 million. At the end of the day, $13.9 million had been raised to help to maintain the Glass House.

Five months before the auction, the trust foundation opened the house for public tours during an inaugural gala picnic on June 23. Guests ranged from legendary artists Jasper Johns and Frank Stella to architectural photographer Julius Shulman and Guggenheim Museum Director Lisa Dennison. Philip’s own nephew, Philip Dempsey, also made an appearance. Foundation executives made it clear to the gathering that they were committed to preserving both the house and the artistic innovations of post-Modernism that Philip and David both championed. “We believe our mission also will extend beyond our boundaries to have a broader impact on modern preservation and continue the vibrancy of the site by maintaining its focus on new ideas and new talent,” said Christy MacLear, the house’s first director.

Today, the estate is open between May and November each year, with 13-person guided tours of the house, “Da Monsta” and both the sculpture and painting galleries. Philip tags along in spirit, channeling his mantra for cutting-edge architectural splendor. “To me, the drive for monumentality is as inbred as the desire for food and sex, regardless of how we denigrate it,” he once told a classroom of Harvard students in the ‘50s. “Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: Building cities for people to live in.”

-----

The whereabouts of Philip Johnson’s remains are unknown. He was 98 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 8: Stella Walsh

2010-06-23T15:43:00.000-07:00

The Woman With the Man-Like Strides

Stella Walsh
1911-1980

Stella Walsh had just bought a bagful of streamers, when she started to walk to her car in a discount-store parking lot near the home she shared with her mother. In the darkness of the frosty December evening, a gunman approached the former Olympic track-and-field standout. The pair struggled for a moment before the blast of a .38-millimeter revolver rang out in the skies above Cleveland’s Slavic Village. Within seconds, Stella lie unconscious with a single gunshot wound to her abdomen. She died a little more than two hours later in the operating room of St. Alexis Hospital while her killer remained on the loose. “Our men have several good, investigative leads that we have developed over the last two days,” said Sgt. Harold Murphy of the Cleveland Police Homicide Unit nearly a week after the killing. “We are working on them around the clock.”

But no arrest ever materialized. To this day, Stella’s murder contains more mystery than an Agatha Christie whodunnit. If the store was filled with shoppers, as police reports indicate, why didn’t anybody hear the gunshot or see the attack? If money provided the motivation to kill, why didn’t the robber take nearly $300 that was stuffed in the pocket of Stella’s red jacket? And after the coroner released a revealing autopsy report, how long had she hidden her sexual deformities from fans who followed her awe-inspiring feats in stadiums around the world?

Stella’s brutal death capped off a life of celebrity, ceremony and secrets. Born Stanislawa Walasiewicz on April 3, 1911, in the tiny village of Wierzchownia in north-central Poland, she was the eldest of three daughters of Julius and Veronica Ucinski Walasiewicz. Fourteen months after her birth, her 20-year-old dad and 16-year-old mom emigrated with “Stasia” to Cleveland, where Julius found work as a roller in the steel mill. The family eventually settled in Slavic Village at 6630 Clement Ave., where Veronica later gave birth to Sophia in 1913 and Clara in 1918.

Stella helped her mother raise the two younger girls when she wasn’t discovering her athletic prowess at both Immaculate Heart of Mary School and South High School in the mid-‘20s. On the school’s oval track outside, she outran all her classmates. With jet-black hair trailing behind her, she captured a gold medal in the 50-yard dash in Cleveland’s 1927 Junior Olympics. But behind the scenes, she harbored a horrifying secret: She possessed male genitalia. The biological abnormality was so pronounced that an embarrassed Stella refused to change clothes in front of the other girls in the locker room. One day, she finally confided in her school chum Beverly Perret Conyers. “She asked me if God did this to her,” Perret told the "Plain Dealer" two months after Stella’s murder. “I said, ‘No, it was a mistake.’ I can’t figure it out. She was raised in dresses.”

Despite her genetic disfigurement, Stella’s fleet-footedness qualified her to compete in the U.S. Olympic trials in Newark, New Jersey, in 1928, only to learn that she couldn’t represent the country in the Amsterdam Games later that year because she had never become a naturalized American. But she continued training while working as a clerk in the Cleveland offices of the New York Central Railroad. And she planned to take her citizenship test in time to qualify for the Los Angeles Games in 1932.

Meanwhile, she started to break world records. In 1930, she eclipsed a previously-set mark in the 50-yard dash in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Back home, she frequented the track at Lakewood High School, where coach George Corneal gave her pointers on how to improve her dash starts to slash precious seconds off her sprint times. She even Anglicized her surname to Walsh to make it easier for supporters to follow her on the road to an Olympic gold medal.

But there was a major glitch. With the country in the throes of a depression, the railroad eliminated Stella’s job at the same time Julius was laid off from his position at the mill. A subsequent offer to work in Cleveland’s recreation department would have made her ineligible for the Olympics since the rules of the era automatically disqualified any athlete whose livelihood centered on physical education. Two days before she was going to take the oath of American citizenship in 1932, she accepted the Polish consulate’s proposal of a spot on her native land’s team. She would represent Poland in L.A.

For the first time, Stella’s performance at the ‘32 games called her sexuality into question, if only briefly, on an international scale. In the 100-meter finals, she edged out Canadian sprinter Hilde Strike by a half-yard to win the gold medal in 11.9 seconds and equal a two-month-old world record. A Canadian team official described Stella running with “long, man-like strides” in an Olympics in which automatic-timing devices and photo-finish cameras were introduced. Most fans brushed off the remark.

The Berlin Games four years later set up a showdown between Stella and her bitter rival, Helen Stephens. In 1935, the six-foot-tall Missouri farm girl stunned the track world by defeating Stella in the 50-yard dash in an American Athletic Union meet. With Adolf Hitler in the stands at the ‘36 Olympics, Stephens set a world record of 11.5 seconds in the 100-meter finals to clearly outpace Stella, who stood on the podium after the race to accept a silver medal for Poland. Ironically, a Polish news reporter charged Stephens with being a man. Olympic officials performed a sex test on her and reported that she was, in fact, a woman.

The runner-up spot in Berlin didn’t deter Stella. Throughout the rest of the ‘30s and all of the ‘40s, she competed around the world in events that also included the discus throw, long jump, hurdles and 4x200 team relay. In 1946 alone, during a European tour, she captured 49 gold medals in 15 meets before she returned home to Cleveland by ocean liner on December 2 and announced she was going to take a “nice, long rest.”

Stella’s appearances were spotty in 1947. In late January, she triumphed in the 50-yard dash at the Philadelphia Enquirer Invitational by posting a 6.4-second time and trouncing her closest competitor. A come-from-behind victory in the 200-meter race brought her another gold medal in June at the senior A.A.U. meet in San Antonio, despite her complaints of a pulled leg muscle before the race. By this time, she had filled three rooms of her parents’ home with a collection of more than 5,000 medals, trophies and ribbons.

The longest race of Stella’s career came to an end on December 12, when federal Judge Paul Jones administered the oath of citizenship to her, 15 years after the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service denied her application at the last minute because she had chosen to represent Poland in the L.A. Olympics. She called the ceremony “the finest Christmas present I ever received.” She then announced her retirement from competitive sports. “I’ve tried to become a citizen for so long a time,” she told reporters. “I may devote all my time to being an instructor in athletics. I’m not going to keep running until I get trimmed by the younger girls.”

Stella quickly changed her mind, though. In late January of 1948, at 36 years old, she declared that she was training for that summer’s London Olympics since World War II put the brakes on the 1940 and 1944 games. The rulebook again forbade her from competing for the U.S. because of her connection to Poland in two previous games. “Naturally, I would like to run for the United States this year but realize that is impossible,” she said. “It probably wouldn’t be considered patriotic to compete for Poland, but I would like one more opportunity to run in the Olympics. That would be a great way to finish my career.”

The aftermath of the war dashed her plans. By 1948, Poland was no more. Six million Poles -- half of them Jews -- had perished in either battle or the Holocaust. The country’s borders were redrawn, resulting in a Poland that was one-fifth smaller than its former self. And the Soviet Union imposed a Communist government that nationalized all of Poland’s natural resources and factories. The nation essentially had gone out of business, leaving Stella without a land to represent.

Nevertheless, her competitive spirit remained. In June, she ran off with first-place finishes in the 100- and 200-meter dashes at the national A.A.U. meet in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For good measure, she finished the day with a victory in the running long jump event. She was back in competition two months later in the Scottish Games at Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Park, where she lopped two-tenths of a second off the A.A.U. record in the 75-yard dash by crossing the finish line in 8.4 seconds.

By March of 1949, Stella was coaching and competing for the Polish Falcons girls’ and women’s track team, which practiced at Cuyahoga Heights High School. The program was innovative; there weren’t many of its kind in the country for female athletes, except those that were sponsored by small, ethnic clubs here and there. In May, 15-year-old Grace Butcher of Chardon joined the team. And one of the first tips she learned from Stella: Tie double knots in the laces of your running shoes so that neither one of your tennies will slip off during a race. “To have an Olympic champion and world record holder for my first coach was almost unheard of in this country,” Butcher wrote in her 1999 tribute to Stella that was published in the anthology, "Whatever It Takes: Women on Women’s Sports." “She wore real track shoes and real warm-up pants, and she was the greatest all-around woman athlete I have ever known.”

As Stella approached her 40th birthday, she vowed several times to retire from the cinder block to write her memoirs and take up a less strenuous sport like golf. But every time she announced her exit from track, she would be back in competition again. A sportswriters’ poll in 1950 may have fueled her desire to win more medals after it named her the greatest Polish-American athlete of the first half of the 20th century.

But Stella knew her days were numbered. Throughout 1950, she lost races as often as she won them. At the national A.A.U. meet in New York City on February 13, she placed second in both the 100-meter and 200-meter finals, outdistanced by runners less than half her age. She then came in third in the broad jump to end a disappointing day. On August 26 in Texas, she again took second place in her specialty event -- the 200 meters -- behind a college student from Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. She then considered an offer to play on a women’s professional basketball squad in Chicago, only to squash the deal because she didn’t want to be stripped of her amateur status.

Stella caught a second wind in 1952. On May 26, at 42 years old, she set two meet records at the Pacific A.A.U. championships in Petaluma, California. She first broke a 13-year-old record in the 100-yard dash by sprinting to the finish line in 12.2 seconds. She then hurled a discus 113 feet to shatter a 14-year-old mark by nearly five feet. A month later, she pleaded with the athletic union to let her compete in the Olympic trials for a spot on the U.S. team in the 1952 Helsinki Games, but she was rejected again because of her participation on the Polish squads of 1932 and 1936. “I am an American citizen now. Poland is no longer a state but a satellite of Russia and an overrun country,” she argued to no avail.

The time had come to map out a plan for the second half of her life. By September, Stella had moved to Glendale, California, where she landed a job as an inspector in a plastics manufacturing plant. She coached the company’s baseball and basketball squads. She organized its intramural bowling league. And she played shortstop on Glendale’s Class A women’s softball team, for which she batted an .804 average and hit 19 home runs during her first season. In one game, she filled in for a pitcher who didn’t show up. Nobody was surprised, when she threw a no-hitter in which nobody on the opposing side reached first base. And as a member of the undefeated Glendale women’s basketball team, she scored 32 points in the championship game of the California Sunshine League.

But Stella also ran into the law. In late-September, she appeared in court on charges that she stole $1.44 worth of butter, cottage cheese and peach preserves from a mom-and-pop grocery store. She paid a small fine and was sent on her way.

Fast forward to 1956. Whether she plotted a scheme to run in the Olympics as an American or actually had fallen in love is in question. But 45-year-old Stella tied the knot with 33-year-old Californian Harry Olson before a justice of the peace in Las Vegas on August 15. She told reporters she met the aviation-company draftsman six years before in Cleveland and again two years later in L.A. The couple dated for more than a year before they walked down the aisle, she said. The marriage -- which ultimately ended in divorce two months later -- opened the door for Stella to try out for the 1956 U.S. Olympics team in Washington D.C. That’s because the games’ international governing committee ruled that an athlete who has competed for one country in a previous Olympics can represent another nation if the competitor is married to a citizen of that country.

Stella was off to the nation’s capital a couple of weeks later. Heartbreak soon flew after her. In a preliminary heat of the 200-meter race, she couldn’t catch up to either Tennessee State track star Lucinda Williams or Boston sprinter Elizabeth McDonnell to qualify for the finals. Her chance for an athletic swan song at the upcoming Melbourne Games evaporated. She walked off the track alone and, for the umpteenth time, said she was bowing out of track-and-field competition for good.

Her fans knew better. In December of 1957, the A.A.U. voted to sponsor 440- and 880-yard races for women. The sanctions gave Stella enough incentive to come out of retirement and compete in the A.A.U. women’s indoor meet in Akron’s Goodyear Gym on March 22, 1958. She finished third in the 880. But her participation secured her a spot on a team with 18 other female runners for a dual meet in Moscow in late July against the Soviet Union. “The Russians avoided me all during my prime,” she told reporters. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to run them off their feet.”

The U.S.-Soviet match-up signaled the end of Stella’s career in international competition. In its place, she concentrated on studying training techniques that women used behind the Iron Curtain, where runners notoriously outperformed their counterparts from outside Eastern Europe. She took notice of the weightlifting that dominated practice sessions. “Their method training is superior to ours,” she said in a 1962 interview. “When I get back home, I’m going to throw all my old training methods in the wastebasket and start all over again with strength training.”

Stella also focused on recruiting children into sports programs, including the one involving the team she coached at the San Fernando Valley Track Club in California. Her motivation to train youngsters stemmed from the races she won, when she was 14 years old at South High School. “We don’t have very many newcomers coming up, and our replacements for today’s name stars are just not there,” she said. “I feel we could make rapid strides if more opportunities would be available to school-age boys and girls.”

After 15 years in California, she moved back to her parents’ home in Slavic Village in July of 1964. Childhood friend Steve Lesiak hired her to take reservations from summer vacationers for the cottages he owned on Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. He also gave her a job tending bar at the Sunrise Café near the corner of East 71st Street and Harvard Avenue. Now a silver-haired 53-year-old, Stella served up sports trivia with pints of beer to her regular customers. “They come here with their sports arguments now,” she told "Plain Dealer" reporter Dan Coughlin at the time. “I’m the arbitrator in their discussions. Most of the people who come in here talk sports.”

In her spare time every day, Stella ran two miles and followed a one-hour calisthenics regimen. She also started to write both her memoirs and a “track bible for girls” in which she stressed the strength training she studied in Eastern Europe. She also traveled to Poland to deliver 50 speeches at the athletic clinics she conducted throughout the country. And she helped train record-breaking sprinters Irena Kirszenstein and Eva Klobukowska, both of whom would score medals in the Tokyo Olympics in October of that year.

After Stella’s father died on September 29, 1972, the sports and Polish communities showered her with accolades with enshrinements in seven halls of fame, including those for the U.S. Track & Field and International Polish-American associations. On August 29, 1978, she was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame. Cleveland’s recreation department also hired her as an instructor in May of 1979 at an annual salary of $10,400, the most money she had ever made in her life. And Polish Minister-Consul Kazimierz H. Cias presented her with the Silver Cross of Merit a year later at the old Chalet West restaurant in North Ridgeville. The award was one of the highest medals that the Polish government bestowed upon its native-born, who had achieved success in their chosen fields.

Then the fateful night of Thursday, December 4, 1980, rocked the fabric of Stella’s family, friends and fans. She had started a week of vacation time from work to plan a reception at Kent State University, where the Polish women’s Olympic basketball team was going to play an exhibition game a week later. Earlier in the day, she stopped at Cleveland City Hall at Mayor George Voinovich’s request to pick up a key to the city to present to a civic group. She then drove home to tell her 85-year-old mother that she was going to the nearby Uncle Bill’s department store at 6801 Broadway Ave. to buy packages of ribbon for the reception. On the way, she made a quick stop at the home of Polish-American community leader Casimir Bielen, presumably to hand over the key that she had retrieved downtown. She told him she was on her way to the store to purchase party supplies.

At 8:45 p.m., after buying the streamers, Stella -- in her trademark outfit of a red jacket, white blouse and slacks and navy-blue blazer to show her pride for the United States -- walked to her 1973 brown Oldsmobile Omega, which was parked about 400 feet from the store’s entrance. Suddenly, a gunman appeared in the darkness. The two fought over his .38-millimeter weapon. The gun fired, and Stella slumped next to her car with a bullet in her abdomen and $290 in her coat pocket.

Moments later, an unidentified male shopper alerted off-duty Cleveland patrolman Robert A. Moff, who found the track-and-field phenom unconscious but still breathing. He called the Cleveland Emergency Medical Service, whose paramedics took about a half-hour to respond to the scene. But nobody could wait that long. The police had to rush Stella to St. Alexis Hospital, where, on the operating table, she died at 11:11 p.m. “We think that someone went to rob her, and she put up a struggle,” homicide detective David Hicks told a Cleveland Press reporter afterward. “There was nitrate evidence on her hand, indicating she must have grabbed the gun.”

Stunned at the news of Stella’s death, her friends, co-workers and fellow athletes paid tribute to a woman, who, at her age, could still outrun competitors 50 years younger than she. Harrison Dillard -- a gold-medal hurdler in the 1952 Olympics and Press sports columnist -- called Stella “a superwoman.” Margaret Batcha, a recreation department typist, bemoaned the murder as a “horrible waste of life.” And Stella’s boss, 1964 Olympic silver-medal sprinter Paul Drayton, applauded her passion for athletics. “She really loved coaching,” he said. “It depressed her to see so much raw talent in this country go to waste.”

Stella’s murder triggered a series of events that reverberated as a testimonial to Cleveland’s love for its hometown Olympian. For starters, 14th Ward Councilman Joseph Kowalski blasted the city’s EMS department, whose leaders blamed the long response time on several ambulances with mechanical problems on a busy night. The "Cleveland Press" then posted a $5,000 reward for anyone who could identify the killer. The Slavic Village Association also set up the Stella Walsh Memorial Fund to upgrade equipment and expand training programs for the city’s young athletes. And WKYC-TV 3 finally dropped a bombshell with its evening-news report four days after the shooting: There was a possibility that Stella was actually a man.

On the morning of December 9, nearly 400 mourners streamed into the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church at 7007 Kazimier Ave. for Stella’s funeral as television videographers filmed them. A family friend gave the WKYC cameraman a piece of her mind about the news story that aired the night before. “Get out of here! Get out of here!“ she screamed. “You’ve got a lot of nerve after that garbage last night.“

Inside the church, the 12 members of the Polish women’s basketball team, clad in red sweatsuits with “Polska” embroidered on the back, walked into the 9:30 mass next to the casket and sat in the front row across from Stella’s mother and sisters, Clara Battiati and Sophia Dirosa. Father Raymond Bartnikowski made sports references in his sermon and compared Stella to a spiritual gold medalist. “There is a saying that no one remembers who came in second. Sometimes, no one remembers who came in first,” he said. “There is but one important event: eternal salvation. It is not measured by time clocks or tape measures, only by God himself.”

Cleveland’s Polish-American community established the “Olympian Stella Walsh Defense Fund” a week after the funeral to earmark money raised from the drive to haul WKYC into court for defaming Stella’s reputation in its report about her sexuality. Bielen, the prominent community leader, also led an effort to boycott any company that advertised with the television station. Attorney Gerald Broski, the former president of the Cleveland Society of Poles, filed the lawsuit. “What was common knowledge known by the family, friends, Polonia and the world for 69 years has been turned into an ugly, sensational disclosure smearing the Olympian reputation of Stella Walsh,” Bielen wrote in a typewritten statement to the media. “Over the lifetime of competitive sports, she was examined by hundreds of doctors and permitted to enter Olympic and other competitive events.”

Cuyahoga County Coroner Samuel Gerber would have the final say. More than two months passed after Stella’s murder before he announced the results of a comprehensive chromosomes test. On February 12, 1981, he read the verdict from his autopsy report: mosaicism. The rare condition in which a human body possesses a weird amalgam of male and female sex organs confirmed that Stella was the world’s most famous and decorated transgendered athlete.

Mosaicism is a complicated freak show. A normally developed fetus carries either XY sex chromosomes for boys or XX chromosomes for girls. But a mosaic embryo contains a mix of either both sets or just one set with no secondary cell. In Stella’s case, her chromosomes were predominantly XY, or male, with a small number of XO chromosomes that had no second X or single Y cell. Babies with similar genetic make-ups often develop facial hair and non-functioning penises as they reach puberty, even if they’re raised as girls. Undoubtedly, the rarity dumbfounded Polish physicians, when Stella was born in 1911. “She was probably identified immediately as an abnormality. The baby, I’m sure, surprised the doctors as this kind of case is so rare,” Gerber said after he released his findings. “As Stella Walsh grew older and it became more obvious that she possessed male sex organs, I am sure the child was traumatized. Yet, it would have meant undergoing additional trauma for anyone to attempt to alter her upbringing as a male and try to raise her as a female.”

Dr. Gerber’s findings shocked the community. Stella’s ex-husband, Harry Olson, was beside himself 25 years after their brief marriage. During those two months, he claimed they had sex a handful of times but only with the lights out. When the test results hit the news, his co-workers started to tease him. “I feel stupid as hell for marrying her,” he said. “I wish I could say I had a hot, passionate affair with her, but we never really did. Maybe I was too naïve to realize anything was wrong.”

Still, Olson joined Stella’s supporters in harpooning the media for turning her death into a carnival sideshow. “People in Cleveland seem torn between loving her and destroying her,” he said. “All this vicious energy should have been organized toward finding her murderer. Who is this helping anyway? There’s got to be a reason for it. Does it give somebody a morbid sense of satisfaction?”

On March 9, Cleveland detectives thought they had made a break in the case. They took into custody an out-of-work, 21-year-old Maple Heights man, who voluntarily showed up with a relative at the Fourth District Police Station at 9333 Kinsman Rd. They said he was known to frequent the Broadway and Union Avenue neighborhood near the Uncle Bill’s store. But the cops released him from jail the next day after he passed a lie-detector test.

With the killer still on the loose, the autopsy report continued its reeling effect on Stella’s family and friends. As a result, three lawmakers in the Ohio House of Representatives -- Ronald Suster of Euclid, Benny Bonanno of Cleveland and Frank Mahnic Jr. of Garfield Heights -- co-sponsored a bill in May of 1981 that would prohibit county coroners from releasing sensitive information in autopsy reports. Rather, the data could only end up in the hands of prosecutors, family members or anyone authorized by the family to see the report.

Stella’s memory lived on, not only at the statehouse, but in her beloved Cleveland. In October of 1981, the city’s public library system honored her by hanging a plaque in its Fleet Avenue branch in Slavic Village. The Sunday afternoon ceremony featured a speech by Bertha Modrzynski, the president of the Polish Falcons Nest 141 Club. Seven of the club members’ children sang “Peace on Earth” and “Kuku Polka” before they presented a basket of flowers to the library. And the club donated a variety of Polish-language books on sports to the system. A month later, Cleveland City Council approved legislation to rename South High School’s rec center after Stella, who launched her track-and-field career on the school’s oval track.

Sadly, the case of Stella’s murder remained cold on the eve of the first anniversary of the shooting. Police said they still received telephone calls from anonymous tipsters, but none of the clues ever panned out. “We have nothing,” detective David Hicks said on December 3. “We’re not sure about the motive. We just hope for calls, but we haven’t had anything concrete.”

Beverly Perret Conyers, the childhood friend in whom Stella confided about her sexual confusion, also expressed her frustration that nobody had ever been arrested for the killing. “I hope it unsettles the person who never got caught,” she said. “They’re sitting back enjoying themselves. I hope something is done to shake them up.”

To this day, Stella’s murder remains unsolved, but her legacy survives. A Polish transplant who always thought of Cleveland as home, she’s remembered for her shy demeanor, polite manners and innate quality to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, religion or creed. Her athletic accomplishments speak for themselves. Perhaps, "Plain Dealer" sports editor Hal Lebovitz, who first met her in the early ‘40s, summed it up best in a column he wrote two days after the attack. “In a sense, she lived in a shadow world, almost a sports oddity,” he wrote. “Yet, Stella was a nice person, always pleasant and accommodating and, in athletic prowess, a champion.”

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Stella Walsh was buried in Section 95, Lot 2003, Plot 1 of Calvary Cemetery, 10000 Miles Ave. in Cleveland. She was 69 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 9: Ross Hunter

2010-06-23T15:39:00.001-07:00

Hollywood’s Golden Boy

Ross Hunter
1920-1996

The freshmen girls in Mr. Fuss’ English class swooned every time their teacher diagrammed a sentence or conjugated a verb. After all, how many faculty members walked the halls of Cleveland’s Glenville High School with piercing blue eyes and wavy blond hair, the same traits that his female students fawned over at their weekend slumber parties as they ogled his photograph in the school yearbook? Because of his young admirers, the handsome, Jewish kid from Cleveland’s East Side would become better known as Ross Hunter, Hollywood’s highest-paid, Oscar-nominated movie producer of his era. His rise to the top of Tinseltown’s elite also would demonstrate the don’t-ask-don’t-tell disdain of gay society in the motion-picture industry.

Martin Fuss was born on May 6, 1920, the second of three children and the only son of Yiddish-speaking Austrian natives Isadore Eizik and Anna Rosen Fuss. His parents immigrated to New York, then Cleveland, in 1904 and bought a $13,000 home at 9510 Yale Ave. south of St. Clair Avenue. Isadore made a comfortable living as a tailor and vice-president of the Mutual Cloak & Suit Company in its downtown headquarters at 1220 W. Sixth St. He and Anna welcomed their firstborn, Freda, shortly after their wedding in 1907. They became parents of a third child, Min, in the early-‘30s.

By all accounts, Martin -- whose last name rhymed with “juice” -- was a bright, precocious boy. In the ninth grade at Empire Junior High School, classmates marveled at his depth of intellectual curiosity as he frantically waved his arms to recite a Shakespearean sonnet or translate a German adjective into English. And nobody doubted that he would write his own success story after graduation. “He sat directly behind me that year in two classes taught by Miss Moskopp,” wrote "Cleveland Press" reporter Bill Barrett in a 1976 article. “By the end of the fourth period every day, I was a nervous wreck. It was because of Martin Fuss. Smartest kid I ever saw. He knew all the answers. Miss Moskopp loved him. I couldn’t stand him.”

Hollywood itself could have made a movie about Martin’s motion-picture debut. After graduating from Glenville in 1938, he earned a Master of Arts degree in theater and English from Western Reserve University while working for tuition as an usher at Playhouse Square. He also acted in productions at both the Cleveland Play House and Cain Park. Toward the end of World War II, he served in the U.S. Army’s intelligence unit for a year, before returning home to Cleveland and his first teaching job at his high school alma mater. He later likened the experience to a “'Welcome Back, Kotter' deal,” referring to the late-‘70s TV show about a teacher in an inner-city school in Brooklyn, New York.

The girls fell hard for the dashing 24-year-old Martin. They insisted he should be in pictures. He joked that they should mail his photograph to an L.A. talent agent. That was all they needed to hear. They sealed both a snapshot and a petition into an envelope and fired them off to Paramount Pictures, demanding that the studio give him a screen test. But within days, the moguls at Columbia Pictures caught wind of the package and requested his presence on the West Coast. Thoroughly impressed with his on-camera charisma, the company offered him a three-year, $1,000-a-week contract. Martin became Hollywood’s newest stud on the silver screen. “What happened to me at Glenville was something that would be regarded as pretty farfetched (today),” he said about his students’ petition 30 years later.

Before any filming began, casting director Maxwell Arnow took the trouble to change Martin’s name to the more commercially appealing Ross Hunter. The studio then put him to work in a string of 10 clunkers between 1944 and 1946. He marked his debut in the leading role of Gordon Pearson opposite Judy Canova in the musical, "Louisiana Hayride," about a girl from the sticks who’s duped by a couple of con men and their promises of fame and fortune in Hollywood. His sophomore effort took place in "Ever Since Venus," about an inventor who markets a new brand of kiss-proof lipstick in the cosmetics industry. Columbia spent so little money to produce the flick that Ross dubbed it “Ever Since Penis.” In his third film, "She’s a Sweetheart," he played a furloughed soldier in a boardinghouse.

When he wasn’t on the set, Ross posed for publicity stills that trumpeted him as a “rising young star.” "Modern Screen" magazine even bowed to studio pressure and named him “the Most Popular Actor” of 1944. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway?” sniffed gossip maven Hedda Hopper in her column.

Ross’ resume continued to balloon with B movies, from "The Bandit of Sherwood Forest" with Cornel Wilde and Edgar Buchanan to "Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," a low-budget film that Columbia made in a mere 10 days. Ross chalked up his movie credentials as “total horrors,” the same description that producer Harry Cohn used to sum up Ross’ performing skills. It turned out that he was the world’s lousiest actor, and Columbia dropped him from its roster as soon as his contract expired in 1947.

To earn a paycheck, Ross resorted to teaching English in an L.A. high school for $57.50 a week. He also studied film production, budgeting and editing in his spare time. By 1950, Universal hired him first as a dialogue coach, then as an associate producer. And a new career that would span nearly 30 years and 45 films at the studio was born. "Flame of Araby," with Jeff Chandler as a Bedouin chief and Maureen O’Hara as a Tunisian princess, marked his behind-the-scenes debut in 1951. He would ultimately work as an assistant on five more films, including "The Duel at Silver Creek" and "Son of Ali Baba," before Universal promoted him to one of its head producers in 1953.

For Ross’ first assignment as a production chief, the studio directed him to the Ann Sheriden vehicle, "Take Me to Town," about a barroom singer with a shady past in a small logging town in the Pacific Northwest. His next two projects included "All I Desire" with the formidable Barbara Stanwyck and "Taza, Son of Cochise" with a novice actor named Rock Hudson. All three films were directed by Douglas Sirk, who shared Ross’ straightforward philosophy about movie-making: To make fans either laugh or cry by the time they leave the theater. The plan worked since their films made money for the studio. “When I started producing, the first question I asked was, ‘Why aren’t they doing any love stories?’ All they were doing was westerns and wars and Arabians,” Ross said in a 1976 "Plain Dealer" interview. “I remember asking why the movie theaters opened at six p.m. instead of at noon when I was a kid. I was told it was because there were no pictures for women. I knew how dumb that was because, as a producer of plays, I knew that women made the selection of what the men were going to see.”

Ross’ modus operandi paved the way for his first box-office blockbuster, "Magnificent Obsession," in 1954. The film -- a remake of the 1935 original that starred Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor -- featured Jane Wyman as a physician’s wife whose life collides with a reckless playboy after her husband’s unexpected death of a heart attack. In his second Hunter production after "Taza," Hudson was cast to play the uncontrollable jet-setter. Ross also added a personal touch to the script by naming one of the film’s minor characters, “Dr. Albert Fuss,” as a tribute to his family in Cleveland.

Critics applauded the flick. The "New York Times" called it a “handsome” weeper with a “moist text.“ Wyman was even nominated for a “Best Actress” Oscar for her performance. Ross knew he had hit upon a profitable combination of sentiment and romance that dictated the genre of most films he would produce for the rest of his career. His sure-fire recipe to portray heartfelt relationships on the screen also filtered into his off-the-set passion for other men, especially the attractive interior decorator he met at the rival MGM studios.

By 1955, the L.A.-born-and-bred Jacques Mapes had established himself as an innovative set designer for 25 movies, including the 1950 biopic, "The Jackie Robinson Story," about major-league baseball’s first African-American player, and the 1952 musical, "Singin’ in the Rain," with Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds. He also designed the set interiors during the first two seasons of the top-rated TV show, "Letter to Loretta," with Loretta Young in 1953 and 1954. He was also nearly seven years Ross’ senior. And the couple nurtured a profound personal and professional relationship for the next 41 years.

But the studio kept the relationship on the down-low. It routinely linked Ross romantically with actresses like Barbara Rush, Martha Hyer and Ludmilla Tcherina. Likewise, Jacques was paired with Jane Powell to disguise his companionship with Ross, who, even as late as the ‘70s, escorted Tina Sinatra to premieres of his movies to make it look like they were a couple.

Despite the charade, Ross continued his mission to produce sugary-sweet films, again teaming Wyman with Hudson in "All That Heaven Allows." If their chemistry could work in one movie, he reasoned, it could certainly duplicate itself in another. The script called for Wyman to portray an upper-class New England widow, who falls in love with a much younger landscaper to the dismay of her children and country-club peers. Ross’ prediction for another box-office smash backfired. Movie reviewers trashed the production, with the "New York Times’" Bosley Crowther criticizing it as a “solid and sensible drama that plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.” The film reaped little profit, and Wyman and Hudson never appeared together in a Hunter film again.

The movie compounded Universal’s financial woes. In 1956, the studio’s production manager warned that, if the company didn’t cash in on another hit, it would have no choice but to shutter its operations. No problem, Ross thought. He had just read a script that was so “sickly sweet, so pure that it could make you vomit.” But the project would need cross-promotion with a hit song to sell tickets. So he hired the composing team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans to write the title track (although, years later, Ross embellished the story by telling reporters he recruited the better-known songwriter Sammy Cahn for the job). The movie was called "Tammy and the Bachelor"; the tune was titled “Tammy”; and the light-hearted mix of film, melody and lyrics warmed strait-laced audiences of the ‘50s. It also saved the studio from bankruptcy. “The song put it over,” Ross remembered in 1977. “You have to be pretty smart to be a really good producer, y’know.”

The film starred the effervescent Debbie Reynolds as 17-year-old Tammy Tyree, who lives with her grandpa on a houseboat, the Ellen B., that’s docked in the Mississippi swamps. One day, wealthy pilot Peter Brent, played by Leslie Nielsen, crashes his plane near their home. And Tammy falls in love with the debonair airman while she nurses him back to health. Critics laughed off the romantic teen comedy as “naïve” and “corny,” but audiences didn’t care. In July of 1957, the National Screen Council honored the movie with its monthly “box-office blue-ribbon award.” Livingston and Evans also scored the “Best Song” Oscar for “Tammy” the following year.

Ross continued to surf the wave of success in 1957 by producing back-to-back remakes of the drama, "Interlude," and the comedy, "My Man Godfrey," both starring June Allyson. His 1958 credits included the melodrama, "The Restless Years," in which Sandra Dee portrayed an illegitimate teen in a small-minded town. And in "This Happy Feeling," director Blake Edwards cast the perky Reynolds to play impulsive Janet Blake, who develops a crush on a retired stage actor.

Ross’ breakthrough film as a producer hit the screen in 1959, when audiences were introduced to the onscreen love connection between Doris Day and Rock Hudson in "Pillow Talk." With Michael Gordon in the director’s chair, the screenplay called for Day’s character as an interior decorator to clash over the use of a telephone party line with Hudson, who played a casanova composer with a bevy of girlfriends. “(Doris) was the girl next door,” Ross said in his recap about the movie’s success. “The housewife liked her because she was like them. But all of a sudden, she was too much like them. So I decided I would take her out of the kitchen and glamorize her. Then the housewife would say, ‘If she can make it, maybe I can.’”

He was right. The romantic comedy cleaned up in Oscar awards and nominations. It won a “Best Screenplay” statuette for Russell Rouse, Clarence Greene, Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin. Day was up for a “Best Actress” trophy, only to lose to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top. Thelma Ritter, who played Day’s alcoholic maid, was nominated for the “Best Supporting Actress” award. The movie also scored nominations in the color-art direction and musical-score categories.

Ross became Hollywood’s golden boy. With Universal’s blessing to produce glossy movies with limitless expense, he again teamed with Sirk to make Imitation of Life with Lana Turner. As the most expensive film ever produced up until 1959, its budget called for more than $1 million alone for its star’s wardrobe. And while critics panned the movie as a mere “soap opera,” the flick raked in $6.4 million at the box office, making it the ninth highest-grossing film of the year and the most successful picture in Universal’s catalog for nearly a decade afterward. It also reinvented Turner, whose career had been flagging ever since her lover had been stabbed to death by her daughter the year before. “I decided if I couldn’t discover new stars, I could at least rediscover old stars,” Ross said about casting Turner in the movie. “I didn’t think they had lost their image. It might have faded a little. But I thought it could be brought back, even if in a different way.”

The formula worked in the early ‘60s. Ross paired Turner with Anthony Quinn in "Portrait in Black." He cast Day opposite Rex Harrison in "Midnight Lace." And he brought together Susan Hayward and John Gavin in "Back Street." Then his winning streak came to an abrupt halt.

In 1961, Universal green-lighted Ross’ idea to adapt Rodgers & Hammerstein’s smash Broadway musical, "Flower Drum Song," for the screen. Calling upon Miyoshi Umeki (who had won a “Best Supporting Actress” Oscar for Sayonara in 1957) to reprise her Tony Award-nominated performance as Mei Li, Ross and director Henry Koster also brought on board Jack Soo from the New York production to play Umeki’s love interest, Sammy Fong.

The script’s plot was complicated and somewhat difficult to follow. In a nutshell, Li travels with her father from China to San Francisco for an arranged marriage to Fong, a nightclub owner who’s already involved with his leading showgirl, Linda Low (played by Nancy Kwan). So, Fong sends Li to the house of Master Wang to present her to the landlord’s son, Wang Ta, who’s also infatuated with the exotic dancer. But once he sees her strip-tease act, he becomes disillusioned, gets drunk and sleeps with his childhood friend, Helen Chao. When Li accidentally discovers the rendezvous, she and her dad resurrect the marriage contract to Fong, who has since proposed to Low. Li then realizes that she’s in love with Ta after all, and the couple tie the knot in a double ceremony with the Fongs.

Confused yet? So were most Americans who saw Ross’ cinematic version. Besides, the movie’s score contained mostly unforgettable music and lyrics. And post-Korean War tension against the Asian culture continued to reverberate across the country. For the first time, one of Ross’ projects lost money at the box office. Still, its costly production values netted the film five Oscar nominations in the art direction, cinematography, costume design, sound and music categories.

Ross rebounded between 1961 and 1963 by making three consecutive films with Sandra Dee, whose last Hunter role was as Lana Turner’s 16-year-old daughter in "Imitation of Life." In two Tammy sequels, "Tammy, Tell Me True" and "Tammy and the Doctor," Dee replaced Reynolds in the title role of the Louisiana teen. And in "If a Man Answers," she played opposite her then-husband Bobby Darin in a lighthearted comedy about a rich socialite who tries to train a photographer to be a perfect husband. The film garnered two Golden Globe nominations: one for “Best Comedy” and another for “Best Supporting Actor” for castmate Cesar Romero.

The trilogy of flicks made more than enough cash at the box office to compensate for "Flower Drum Song’s" losses. And Universal recognized Ross’ worth by throwing a star-studded celebration in its commissary, where emcee Carl Reiner announced that the studio had offered the former Cleveland high school teacher a seven-year contract worth $75 million. The deal was, by far, the most lucrative of its kind at the time. It also afforded Ross and Jacques a luxurious lifestyle in the most exclusive enclave of Beverly Hills.

The couple built a two-story mansion on the highest hill of Trousdale Estates. To get to the top of the incline, visitors had to navigate their cars up the curved driveway to a set of marble steps that led to a mammoth front door with lion’s-head handles. Four white, brick columns also flanked the entrance.

Once inside, displays of Waterford crystal, candelabras and potted palm trees greeted guests in the foyer. The house also contained a mirror-lined dining room that overlooked an in-ground swimming pool in the backyard, the Los Angeles skyline on the horizon and, on a smog-free day, the Pacific Ocean in the distance. The master bedroom upstairs -- with its floor-to-ceiling windows -- was perched so high up that nobody could peek in, even in the couple’s most passionate moments.

A movie-projection room afforded ample space to scope out Ross’ films. The muted colors of the living room showed off the pair’s vast collection of European antiques, sculptures and cabinetry. They also provided the perfect backdrop to spotlight Ross’ quirky fetishes for collecting more than 500 paintings of lemons and an assortment of zebra-inspired accessories, including a black-and-white rug made from the hide of a zebra that once roamed the African bush. “I wanted the house to represent all the things I like,” he told future best-selling British author Barbara Taylor Bradford in 1971, when she was writing her syndicated column, “Designing Woman,” that appeared in 183 American newspapers, including the "Cleveland Press." “You might say I wanted the public to know I wasn’t kidding, and that what I put on the screen I really like myself.”

Between 1963 and 1967, Ross produced eight respectable romantic comedies and dramas, such as the screen adaptation of the Enid Bagnold play, "The Chalk Garden," which earned a “Best Supporting Actress” Oscar for Dame Edith Evans in the role of an English widow in search of a governess (Deborah Kerr) for her troubled granddaughter (Hayley Mills). Other projects included the 1965 comedy, "The Art of Love," in which Dick Van Dyke played an American painter in Paris, where he fakes his own death to hike the value of his art pieces. And for "The Pad and How to Use It," actor James Farentino walked out of the Golden Globe award ceremony in 1967 with the “Most Promising Newcomer” trophy for portraying a bachelor who finds his ideal mate at the symphony.

Then Ross hit paydirt with one of the most upbeat flicks of the ‘60s. In the 1967 musical, "Thoroughly Modern Millie," Julie Andrews -- who had already captured audiences’ hearts in "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music" -- played a fresh-faced Kansas girl, who bursts onto the New York social scene eager to become a woman of the world in the roaring ‘20s. The film owed much of its success to its charming score, whose most recognizable song was “Baby Face.” Ross also had to acquire the rights to the 1919 tune, “Jazz Baby,” to use in the movie since its owner, General Mills, had relied on the song as an advertising jingle to promote its breakfast cereal, Wheaties, for more than 40 years.

With critics salivating over the finished product and theatergoers snapping up tickets, "Millie" earned $15 million in the U.S. alone, making it Universal’s most successful movie to date. It also capped off the year with an impressive five Golden Globe and seven Oscar nominations. At the Golden Globes, Carol Channing beat the competition in the “Best Supporting Actress” category for her role as an eccentric widow. And composer Elmer Bernstein snagged an Oscar for “Best Original Score.”

Ross’ latest box-office triumph offered him a chance to form his own production company, with Universal as his films’ sole distributor. Naturally, he named the firm after himself and brought Jacques into the fold as his primary associate producer. The partners’ first project together was Rosie!, a screen adaptation of actress Ruth Gordon’s play, "A Very Rich Woman." For their director, they called upon David Lowell Rich, who then cast Rosalind Russell in the title role of a generous, wealthy woman whose two daughters (Audrey Meadows and Vanessa Brown) try to commit her to an insane asylum before she can spend every dime of her fortune. Rosie’s granddaughter (Sandra Dee) thwarts the plan by intervening in her aunts’ scheme.

The production received glowing reviews. Critics bandied about Russell’s name for an Oscar. But Universal failed to promote the flick. As a result, Ross lost money on his venture for the second time in his career. He wouldn’t see his name on the silver screen again for two years. It took a 1968 Arthur Hailey thriller to bring him out of exile.

Set in Chicago in the middle of a blizzard, "Airport" contained all the elements of a blockbuster that Ross required: romance and infidelity, danger and disaster, an ensemble cast of charismatic characters. Director George Seaton based the screenplay on the Hailey novel, in which a mentally ill passenger boards a Rome-bound Boeing 707 with a homemade bomb in his suitcase. He hired heartthrobs Burt Lancaster as the airport’s manager, Dean Martin as the co-pilot and Van Heflin as the suicidal bomber. Jacqueline Bissett as the pregnant chief stewardess and Jean Seberg as the airport’s public-relations manager provided eye candy for the screen. And Maureen Stapleton as Heflin’s wife and Helen Hayes as an elderly stowaway dispensed their award-winning acting skills in supporting roles.

Ross allocated nearly 70 percent of his $11.5 million budget to the $18,000-a-day rental fee for the 707 used in the film. Crews then shot all the location scenes in early 1969 in the terminal and on the tarmac of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where a Minnesota winter could dump all the snow that was needed for a blustery backdrop. But leave it to Murphy’s Law, for a sign that now hangs in the airport says that “the weather remained stubbornly clear, forcing the director to use plastic ‘snow’ to create the appropriate effect.”

"Airport" opened in movie theaters nationwide on March 5, 1970. By the end of the year, its box-office take worldwide grossed a staggering $100.4 million, an amount that kept Universal in the black for the next three years. The film also scored a whopping 11 Oscar nominations, including one for Ross for “Best Producer” in the only time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would recognize him for his work. (He didn’t win, but Hayes took home the “Best Supporting Actress” statuette.) “I must confess. I believe 'Airport' became such a hit because it was the only movie of its kind on the screen at the time,” Ross said six months after the film’s release. “We gave audiences something they couldn’t get any place else.”

Despite the movie’s record-breaking numbers, Ross never produced another project for Universal again. Deliberately vague with reporters, he claimed he couldn’t find another script that could rival or top Airport. In April of 1971, he and Jacques moved Ross Hunter Productions into a suite of comfy offices at Columbia Pictures, the same studio that dropped Ross from its actors’ roster nearly 25 years earlier.

But their association with the company didn’t last long, thanks to the only movie they ever made for their new bosses. To say a remake ---a musical one, at that -- of "Lost Horizon" almost drove Columbia out of business would be an understatement. But nobody foresaw the film’s colossal failure before and during its production.

Director Frank Capra first adapted the James Hilton novel for the screen in 1937, with Ronald Colman portraying a British diplomat on a hijacked DC-10 that crashes in the Himalayan mountains of Tibet. After he and 90 fellow Westerners are rescued, an English-speaking postulant guides them to the temperate paradise of Shangri-La, where its inhabitants enjoy youthful looks and long lives.

Thirty-five years later, Ross felt compelled to produce an updated version of the film. He and Jacques hired gay playwright Larry Kramer to write the screenplay. They contracted with the songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David to compose the music. And they asked 35-year-old Englishman Charles Jarrott to direct the project.
With the crew in place, they chose Peter Finch to play the diplomat with a supporting all-star cast that included Sally Kellerman, John Gielgud, Liv Ullman, Michael York, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy and Charles Boyer.

The set was as impressive as its actors. Ross had a nearly four-acre Shangri-La built on the Columbia lot for a half-million dollar price tag. It featured a 600-foot-long mountain range made of plaster, four glimmering swimming pools, two 40-foot-high waterfalls and an 80-foot-high monastery. The studio’s secretaries often spent their lunch hours on the set to gaze at its magnificence. All told, the total production cost amounted to just shy of $7 million, making the film one of the priciest to produce in the early ‘70s.

The movie opened on New Year’s Day of 1973 to a chorus of critics’ boos for the tone-deaf and dance-challenged cast of actors. "New York" magazine reviewer John Simon wondered if the reels came in garbage, not film, cans. The always-opinionated Pauline Kael of the "New Yorker" wrote that “there’s probably no way to rethink this material without throwing it all away.” Audiences agreed. American box offices pulled in an embarrassing $3 million in ticket sales, which didn’t recoup even half of what Ross’ production company spent to remake the flop. Still, he stood by his latest baby. “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, and I wouldn’t tell a critic what to write,” he said three months after the movie’s release. “But they have to realize for whom I’m making movies. I’ve learned that people want to see films offering some love, beauty and hope in a world where these things don’t seem to exist. I believe they do exist, and that’s what I want to give.”

Columbia’s top brass didn’t see it that way. To them, "Lost Horizon" was a lost investment. At 53, Ross’ golden touch was starting to tarnish. The utopia that he strived to bring to movie buffs was taking a backseat to thrillers like "The Exorcist," westerns like "The Sting" and coming-of-age flicks like "American Graffiti," all of which were the highest-grossing films of 1973. So, Ross and Jacques parted ways with the studio, dismayed with the direction Hollywood had taken in its movie-making. “It didn’t work. What more can I say?” Ross said. “I put up a front and went out and promoted ('Lost Horizon'). But the critics in this country just massacred us. They were waiting for me to stumble. And, in all honesty, I don’t think it was as bad as they said it was.”

After his production company gathered up its equipment and moved from its suite of offices on the Columbia lot, Ross floated from one independent studio to the next. He pitched movie ideas, only to leave behind scraps of footage to unfinished projects. In 1975, he joined Paramount Pictures and decided to switch to a medium to which all deposed motion-picture producers went: television. His first made-for-TV movie, "The Lives of Jenny Nolan," aired on NBC later that year.

The program starred Shirley Jones as a news reporter who investigates a politician’s assassination while trying to solve her husband’s mysterious death. But critics decimated the production, singling out Jones’ wardrobe over the script as better-suited for the screen. Ross blamed the network for its interest in meeting a deadline than taking the time to make a quality product. He also lambasted himself for being “quite naïve about the television-network scheme of things.”

A year later, Ross returned to NBC to produce "The Moneychangers," a four-part mini-series based on another best-selling Arthur Hailey novel about a couple of high-ranking bankers who are in a power struggle to become CEO. He asked network executives for a $1 million budget to cast the film with household names, including Kirk Douglas and Christopher Plummer in the leading roles. Two hours later, they gave him the go-ahead. And in December of 1976, each of the parts aired on successive Sundays throughout the month. The critics adored the series. “When I went to the network this time, I decided to lay it on the line,” Ross told Plain Dealer television critic William Hickey two weeks before the first installment was broadcast. “I was burned once and was determined that would never happen again. I was pleasantly surprised by their attitude of cooperation.”

Because of "The Moneychangers’" reception, NBC inked a deal with Ross that gave him ownership to the negatives of all the films he’d produce. It also agreed to grant his company generous production schedules and financing packages. The contract cleared the way for him and Jacques to make "A Family Upside Down" in 1978 with Fred Astaire and Helen Hayes as a retired couple who move in with their son while Astaire’s character recuperates from a heart attack. Ross wrote the story himself. “I left the script at Fred’s house one afternoon, and he called me at one in the morning,” he told Astaire biographer Bob Thomas in 1984. “He wasn’t sure he was capable of such a dramatic part. I told him to forget it. ‘You’ll knock the hell out of it.’ We talked for four hours, and at the end, Fred agreed to do the movie.”

Later that year, Astaire copped an Emmy for his role, and the program would be named the “best motion picture made for TV” at the Golden Globes. Ross and company were psyched to take on their next project, "The Best Place to Be," which was based on the Helen Van Slyke novel. With Donna Reed in the role of a widow who’s having an affair with a much-younger man, the story took place in Cleveland and Shaker Heights. It also cost $3.5 million and took 10 weeks to shoot the scenes on 63 different sets to make it on the air in time for the all-important May sweeps period of 1979. The harried schedule was so nerve-wracking that Ross came down with a case of shingles. He never again produced another movie for either television or the big screen because of the hassles. “Time, not money, is the element that separates movies made for TV and a real, honest-to-God feature film,” he groaned to UPI reporter Vernon Scott. “You can always cut budgets, but you can’t cut time. Nobody can write or produce well under duress.”

By January of 1981, Ross found solace in directing dinner-theater productions, including "The Gingerbread Lady" with Vera Miles at the Beverly Playhouse in New Orleans. He simultaneously toyed with the thought of producing the film, "The Jazz Babies," with Carol Channing as the leader of an all-girl band, but nothing ever came of it. After the play wrapped up its month-long run, he and Jacques quietly retired to their Beverly Hills mansion to rest on their laurels. In a 1985 interview, Ross reflected on his catalog of movies. “They weren’t great, but they weren’t supposed to be,” he said. “I gave the public what they wanted: A chance to dream, to live vicariously, to see beautiful women, jewels, gorgeous clothes, melodrama.”

At home, on Sunday, March 10, 1996, Ross suddenly died of a heart attack. He was buried in the same Los Angeles cemetery as Natalie Wood and Donna Reed. His crypt is caddy-corner to that of Marilyn Monroe’s. And the lush, lavish movies he made throughout his career remain his legacy. “I don‘t want to hold a mirror up to life as it is,” he often said. “The way life looks in my pictures is the way I want life to be.”

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Ross Hunter was interred in the Corridor of Memories of the Pierce Brothers’ Westwood Village Memorial Park & Mortuary, 1218 Glendon Ave. in Los Angeles, California. He was 75 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 10: Doris Palmer

2010-06-23T15:37:00.001-07:00

The Caretaker of Lost Souls

Doris Palmer
1936-2007

Cleveland’s LGBT community swarmed the Memoirs hotspot during a typical happy hour in the late 1980s. Inside the oak-paneled club, bartenders ran ragged as they tried to keep pace with each round of cocktails. And as businessmen in Armani suits hobnobbed with college coeds doused in Polo cologne, the bar’s five-foot-two-inch owner chatted up regulars while she chain-smoked Merit cigarettes and sipped Christian Brothers brandy from her personal shot glass.

Meet Doris Palmer, a former office manager whose reputation as a tough-talking entrepreneur belied her compassion for patrons infected with the new “gay cancer” of the era. By the time of her death, close comrades remembered her as one of a pioneering group of civic activists who were undaunted by the challenges that the AIDS pandemic posed in the early days. “When someone was diagnosed with the virus, it was a big deal,” said longtime friend John Katsaros, who eventually worked for and went into business with Doris from the late-‘80s to the mid-‘90s. “She knew everyone on a personal level. If you looked sickly, she went out of her way to help you. She was a generous lady.”

Doris Jean Thompson was born on October 18, 1936, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the same hometown as that of ultraconservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, St. Louis Cardinals baseball pitcher Mark Littell and 1970s country crooner Billy Swan. Known as “the City of Roses” for its prominent gardens and as the home of Southeast Missouri State University, the town provided a historical backdrop for her, as she undoubtedly listened to tales of its infamous Civil War battle in which dozens of Union and Confederate soldiers perished during a four-hour siege on April 26, 1863.

Doris’ family lived in a blue-collar world in “the Cape.” Her father, James Thompson, had worked in a shoe factory since he was 16 years old. By his 21st birthday in 1934, he had married Lillian Katherine Blakemore, a gregarious and witty 17-year-old with a charming Ozark drawl. The Thompsons raised Doris and her younger sister, Jo Ann (“Joni”), in a home on Merriwether Street a little more than a mile from the western banks of the Mississippi River and the Southern Illinois border. But their marriage collapsed by 1948, and Lillian wed another shoemaker named James, whose story was riddled with pitfalls and roadblocks.

An Arkansas native, James A. Southworth had muddled through a hardscrabble life. His dad died by the time he was 11; his mom supported her only child on a housekeeper’s meager wages. Dropping out of high school after his freshman year in high school, he crossed the state line into Missouri to work for the St. Louis-based International Shoe Company. In his early 30s, his first marriage had failed, although the four-year union produced his only son, James. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private and served until the end of World War II. He returned to Cape Girardeau afterward and married Lillian.

The Southworths made a home on South Henderson Avenue while Doris attended Cape Central High School as a member of the Class of 1955. Some of her male classmates would make school history in the fall of their senior year, when the Cape Central Tigers varsity basketball squad handily defeated an all-boys’ parochial high school from St. Louis to capture its first-ever Class A state championship trophy in 1954. But Doris wouldn’t take part in the celebration in the school gym, where the faculty and student body cheered Coach Lou Muegge and his team for their victory.

Like many teenage girls of the ‘50s in the heart of the Ozarks, Doris chose the wedded life over an education. At the end of her sophomore year at the age of 16, she dropped out of school and married Rudolph G. Palmer, a 20-year-old laborer who eventually found work in Cleveland as a rigger and janitor at J & L Machine & Tool, which manufactured permanent molds and die castings at its plant on Miles Avenue. Lillian must have given her blessing to her elder daughter’s marriage since Missouri law required parental approval for any bride younger than 18 years old.

Rudy and Doris nestled into Apartment #1 in a three-unit building at 3131 W. 54th St. south of Clark Avenue. They rented the place for two years before they moved to more spacious living quarters at 1402 W. 58th St. near Detroit Avenue. In turn, baby sister Joni and her new husband, Harry G. Lawrence, took over the lease after they moved from Missouri, and Harry found a job as a security guard at Edward Blywise’s Grabler Manufacturing Company on Broadway Avenue. Doris’ marriage, however, wouldn’t survive another year. The Palmers separated by 1959.

Doris didn’t talk much about her relationship with Rudy in later years. On the rare occasion when she did, she told her friends that she adored him but blamed the end of their six years together on their immature decision to leap into marriage so quickly. Yet she kept his last name for the rest of her life. “She always said, ‘I married the nicest guy in the world. We were just too young,’” Katsaros remembered.

In 1961, Doris was renting half of a two-family home at 17600 Flamingo Ave. one block south of Puritas Avenue in the city’s West Park neighborhood. Dentists Sanford C. Frumker and Norman Arnold then hired her as an office secretary for their downtown practice on the seventh floor of the Rose Building at 2060 E. Ninth St. She grew especially fond of working for Dr. Frumker, whom she affectionately nicknamed “Frumkie.” Naturally, her paychecks helped keep a roof over her head throughout the ‘60s in a succession of apartments, from the Clifton Court complex at 11118 Clifton Blvd. on the West Side to the historic Park Lane Villa Apartments at 10510 Park Lane in University Circle. The latter, built as a luxury hotel in 1923, originally catered to avant-garde bohemians in the arts, music and science fields before it morphed into a popular concert venue in the ‘50s for the likes of folk heroes Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.

Doris ventured into real estate in 1970, when she bought her first two-family rental at 3259 W. 115th St. north of Lorain Avenue. She leased one half of the double to a string of tenants while she and her twice-divorced mother -- who moved to Cleveland to be closer to her daughters -- lived in the other half. Doris also left her job at Frumker, Arnold & Siegel (the firm brought on board Cleveland Heights dentist Burton P. Siegel as a partner in 1966) to manage a 27-member office staff at Mondie Forge, a parts manufacturer for the industrial-machinery market at 3001 W. 121st St.

Doris boosted her income by juggling her day job with a weekend gig as a barmaid for Leo Swingo and his gay son, Teddy, at the Nantucket club near the corner of Clifton Boulevard and West 117th Street on the Cleveland-Lakewood border. After playing traffic cop in the office during the week, she hustled on Saturdays and Sundays by pouring shots of booze and mugs of beer for the bar’s mix of gay and straight patrons. The club garnered even more popularity in 1976, when the state granted the Swingos the first Sunday liquor license for a West Side bar. The business coup allowed Doris to open the club on a day when most neighborhood imbibers had nowhere else to go to swill back their favorite libations.

The moonlighting allowed Doris to upgrade her home base. She sold the West 115th Street property in 1980 and traded her big-city lifestyle for the suburban comforts of Rocky River. In a respectable neighborhood at 1630 Northview Rd. east of Wagar Road, she, her mother and their yappy poodle lived in the lower half of the duplex. And for the next 20 years, another chain of renters occupied the upper half.

When the Swingos sold the Nantucket in 1983 to make room for a Rini-Rego’s supermarket, Doris often spent happy hours at the nearby Tick Tock Tavern. Owned by Katsaros’ father, Gus, the club served as a meeting spot for many gay men who partied in the Clifton-Edgewater neighborhood. It also provided Doris with a rendezvous to reacquaint herself with patrons to whom she had served cocktails for more than a decade. “She missed all the guys after the Nantucket closed,” Katsaros said. “She was out of circulation for awhile, and she was getting herself out there so that nobody forgot her. And she did a great job doing it.”

Doris’ self-marketing skills paid off in 1987, when she decided to plunge into the business world by opening her own gay bar. Although she no longer worked for him, her tight relationship with Frumker was no secret. Because of their mutual respect for each other, the doctor fronted most of the money to buy the Zeleznik’s watering hole at 11213 Detroit Ave. “But she paid him back in no time,” Katsaros said. “She worked very hard. And she was very smart because she saved a lot of money to repay the loan.”

Doris vigorously promoted her club before its grand opening. And Paul Trenkamp never forgot the time that led up to her first day in business. After she signed the papers to take over ownership of the building and bar, she marched into the trendy gay nightclub, Legends, five blocks down Detroit Avenue in Lakewood. She then rounded up 30 customers, inviting them for free drinks in her soon-to-open gay oasis. As they walked through the front door, she startled Zeleznik’s clientele with a stunning announcement. “She said, ‘Fuck you all! I own this place now!’” Trenkamp recalled. “It was one massive party after that.”

Doris named her new venture, Memoirs, as an homage to the fun times she shared with her Nantucket regulars. By no surprise, they celebrated by patronizing her new business. “It was a neighborhood bar where the doors opened at 10 in the morning,“ said Stan Kawecki, who resigned from a lucrative yet “stressful” position as a radiation physicist to work for Doris as a bartender from 1988 to 1995. “If you didn’t unlock the doors by one minute after ten, the regulars were pounding like crazy to get in.”

Business only escalated. On an average weekday, bartenders rang up $1,500 in beer and liquor sales. The cash-register tape often read more than $2,000 after last call on a usually bustling Friday or Saturday night. “Everybody went there to meet because it wasn’t just a weekend bar or a leather bar,” Kawecki said. “It had a cohesive staff with very little turnover. It was always packed, and the bartenders ran their asses off.”

Many customers credited Memoirs’ success to the innovations that Doris agreed to add to the club. For starters, she was the first owner of a gay Cleveland bar to hire a DJ to host weekly karaoke contests. She devoted an adjacent room to a full-scale restaurant. And she befriended down-and-out, unemployed patrons by hiring them for menial, yet necessary, tasks such as scrubbing the restrooms first thing in the morning. “Doris was always taking care of her regulars,” Kawecki said. “She’d find these lost souls and give them jobs.”

Doris’ activism in the war against AIDS and HIV also never wavered as long as her nightclub remained a vital component of the LGBT community. She welcomed an ensemble of female impersonators to perform as “the Dolly Express” six times a year to raise money for AIDS charities. And when the now-defunct AIDS Housing Council declined a customer’s grant application to help him pay for his basic necessities, she feuded with the non-profit agency until it caved in. “She went ballistic,” Kawecki said. “If she had to, she dipped into her own pocket to pay for mattresses or someone’s rent. That’s how she was if it was for the community.”

In July of 1991, Doris partnered with Katsaros to buy a Warehouse District bar that had been vacant for three years, after the original Blind Pig Speakeasy lost its liquor license because of unpaid sales taxes. Located at 1281 W. Ninth St., the two-story nightclub they christened Detour quickly rivaled Memoirs in popularity. The gay community’s admiration for Doris as one its straight allies also intensified to the point that she picked up the most votes as “Woman of the Year” in a 1993 readers’ poll conducted by the once-flourishing "Valentine News" magazine. She accepted the award in a glitzy ceremony at the U4ia nightspot on Berea Road.

But Doris also harbored an “alcoholic-crazy” side to her complex personality, Kawecki said. After she stuffed her bank bag with the day’s take and locked Memoirs’ doors for the night, she frequently accompanied him and fellow bartender Caesar Salas to greasy spoons like My Friends restaurant on Detroit Avenue or Dianna’s Deli on West 117th Street. The after-hours pit stops often resulted in the diners’ managers ordering the trio to hit the sidewalk because of Doris’ drunken outbursts. “She’d start yelling and swearing at people across the room,” Kawecki said. “She’d throw her pancakes if there was a drag queen in the restaurant that she didn’t like.”

Doris also exhibited goofy behavior at home because of her alcoholism. During a spring cleaning of her basement office, Kawecki discovered $3,000 in cash in a canvass backpack that she apparently forgot she stashed in the bottom drawer of her desk. He also learned that she stuffed her mattress with dollar bills. “You can bet that she made a lot of money in all her years in business,“ he said. “But she gave a lot of money back (to charity).”

Nevertheless, Doris’ enthusiasm for the bar business started to wane in 1994. She and Katsaros -- who, in 1992, opened the Cliffhangers nightclub on Clifton Boulevard -- were both burned out. She, especially, became “jaded“ by the club life, he said. So they sold Detour to a group of investors that included gay DJ Jerry Szoka, who helped revamp the club into the Grid. A year later, Doris closed the books on Memoirs by selling the bar and building to another set of backers led by a Cincinnati dentist, who subsequently changed the bar’s name to Sexx. Their ill-fated attempt in business lasted no more than a year after a series of building-code violations forced them to shutter the club. It eventually reopened under new ownership as the Edge, the third and final gay bar that took up the space until the first week of March of 2007 with the opening of the punk-rock club, Now That’s Class.

In her retirement, Doris retreated to her Rocky River home, where her mother’s health began to fade in 1997. So she put the Northview Road double up for sale, and she and the 80-year-old Lillian moved to the warmer climes of the Tri-Par Estates development in Sarasota, Florida. But the change of scenery didn’t help. In a two-bedroom modular home on Winged Foot Avenue, her mother died of emphysema on December 11, the result of a longtime chain-smoking habit that Doris imitated throughout her adult life. Lillian’s passing caused her daughter to slip into a severe mental and emotional funk. “(Moving to Florida) was the worst thing she ever did,” Katsaros lamented. “She was so outgoing that she surrounded herself with a lot of people who took advantage of her. And she was very lonely after her mom died.”

Doris tried to lift her spirits by keeping in touch with her Cleveland connections. An avid shutterbug, she sometimes mailed envelopes of photographs from years gone by to remind her friends of the good times they all shared at either Memoirs, Detour or the Nantucket. But like her mother, Doris died of emphysema on Monday, February 18, 2007, at the Tidewell Hospice and Palliative Care facility in Sarasota, where her cremated remains were shipped to Northeast Ohio for burial in the same plot with her mother’s ashes.

Many of Doris’ friends and former employees up north blamed her death not only on heavy smoking but an exascerbating combination of alcoholism and loneliness. Nearly three months later, on May 12, revelers spent their Saturday afternoon at Katsaros’ bar, the renamed Twist Social Club, for a festive “Celebration of Life” blowout in Doris’ honor. “She was an endearing character,” he said. “You don’t find many of them these days. She was the last of a generation that knew how to make the most of life.”

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Doris Palmer was buried in Section 39, Lot 400, Plot 1 of Sunset Memorial Park, 6245 Columbia Rd. in North Olmsted. She was 70 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 11: Mary Ann Finegan

2010-06-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

Solved!

Mary Ann Finegan
1939-1982

With the summer of 1982 just days away, Mary Ann Finegan tooled north on Interstate 77 in her 1969 Ford pick-up truck. The late-night drive from her Barberton home to downtown Cleveland should have triggered a one-woman celebration of sorts since a much-needed summer vacation had just begun for the middle-school guidance counselor. But a profound level of sadness consumed her during the 45-minute trip as she dealt with the break-up of a girlfriend the week before. Perhaps a night on the town with friends would lift her spirits.

Call it sheer coincidence or divine intervention. As Mary Ann walked from a West Sixth Street parking lot to the go-to lesbian nightclub, Isis, her ex spotted her from the passenger seat of a friend’s car. So the woman stowed her purse and house keys in the trunk of her dinner companion’s vehicle and flagged down Mary Ann. The pair walked back to the faded-red truck to talk.

By the end of the night, nobody could have predicted the horror of the women’s abductions, the rape of the ex-girlfriend, and, ultimately, Mary Ann’s murder. It would take nearly three decades for the Cleveland Police Department to track down her killer. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get (the criminals),” said Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason in 2010, when he announced the indictment of a career jailbird for the ghastly crime. “We’re going to be vigilant until we get them. We’re going to continue to push forward on every case that we have.”

But the pledge for justice came too late for Mary Ann. Born on December 14, 1939, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was the only child of Clare Earl “Pat” and Emelie Ann Zdila Finegan. At the time of her murder, the Finegan name had become synonymous with decades of reputable retail service in Summit County’s floral industry. But to trace the timeline that led to the family’s entrepreneurial success is to connect the dots back to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Mary Ann’s paternal great-great grandparents, Patricius “Patrick” and Jane Finegan, emigrated from Ireland to the U.S. in the early 1830s. The couple settled in the town of Cumberland in the Maryland Panhandle. There, Patrick supported a brood of three sons and three daughters on his wages as a self-employed tailor in the Finegan & Robinette firm.

The Finegans’ fifth child, Amos, made the family proud by fighting for the Union in the Civil War, enlisting as a sergeant in Company C of the Maryland Infantry’s Third Potomac Home Brigade in December of 1861. During the next four years, the company fought in several battles, including a three-day clash with Robert E. Lee’s Confederate troops at Harpers Ferry. It then was assigned to guard the Baltimore-Ohio rail line until it was mustered out a month after the end of the war in April of 1865.

Amos established himself after his military service as a respected businessman 15 miles north of Cumberland in the heart of coal-mining country in Meyersdale, Pennsylvania. His reputation as a skilled house painter and interior decorator became the talk of the town. So did his 1876 marriage to a local girl, Emma Lent, who was 10 years his junior. The union produced four sons and a daughter, including their third child, Amos Earl, in March of 1889. To distinguish himself from his dad, the boy juxtaposed his first and middle names and referred to himself as “Earl” on legal and census documents.

By 1912, the 23-year-old Earl moved to Summit County to work as a machinist in Akron’s rubber plants. He married his sweetheart, Hilda “Helen” Trumphour, the following year and bought a $6,000 house at 64 S. Seventh St. in Coventry Township. The couple plunged into parenthood with the births of Clare Earl in 1914, Betty in 1917 and Patricia in 1921. And in an apparent homage to Earl’s grandfather, Patricius, they affectionately called their only son “Pat,” who demonstrated a childhood gift for playing music, most notably on the violin. By 1930, Earl quit his job in the mills and converted half of his home into the family-run East End Greenhouse.

On the other side of Mary Ann’s family, her maternal grandfather, Adam Zdila, emigrated from his native Austria-Hungary to the United States in 1896. At 15 years old, he boarded the Red Star ocean liner, the "Friesland," in Antwerp, Belgium, with a handful of other laborers to look for work in Pennsylvania’s coal mines. He subsequently was hired by the L.P. Carter Coal Company in Monessen.

His future wife, the Czech-born Anna “Annie” Sepesky, crossed the Atlantic on April 3, 1911, when she and her one-year-old daughter, Anna, boarded the "Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm" in Bremen, Germany, and sailed to New York. Settling in suburban Pittsburgh, she and Adam married in 1912 and bought a home in New Kensington, where they raised two sons and four more daughters. Their fourth child, Emilie, was born in December of 1920.

Pat Finegan and Emilie Zdila met and married in Pennsylvania in the late 1930s, after he moved from Coventry Township to live with his dad’s family in Meyersdale. Throughout the western half of the state, Pat was well-known on the nightclub circuit as an accomplished violinist when his daughter was born. By 1946, while Mary Ann was in grammar school, the family relocated to the Akron area, where Pat landed a salesman’s job with the Borden Ice Cream Company. He also continued to moonlight as a nightclub entertainer, joining Local 24 of the American Federation of Musicians.

By that time, Earl and Hilda’s greenhouse business had outgrown their South Seventh Street home. They moved into larger living quarters and retail space at 920 Kenmore Blvd. in Akron, christening their new store Finegan’s Flower Shop. They advertised “flowers for every occasion,” especially those for wedding bouquets and funeral arrangements. And Pat, his wife and daughter set up house in his parents’ former home in Coventry Township.

Pat left his sales position and joined the his parents’ business the following year. But tragedy struck the Finegan clan. Shortly before Thanksgiving of 1949, the 35-year-old Pat suddenly collapsed and died of a massive heart attack at Peoples Hospital. He left Emilie a 28-year-old widow; Mary Ann was just 10 years old. To support herself and her daughter, Emilie started her own flower business, Cottage Floral Shop, in their Seventh Street home less than a year after Pat’s death.

Mary Ann, meanwhile, immersed herself in both schoolwork and extra-curricular activities. A member of Kenmore High School’s Class of 1957, whose student body nicknamed her “Finy,“ she served as the president of the school’s Future Teachers of America chapter, treasurer of the Booster Club and social chairperson of its choir and orchestra. She read morning announcements on the public-address system, performed in her class’ amateur show, and shot hoops in the Y-Teen basketball league. And in her senior yearbook, "The Eromnek" (“Kenmore” spelled backwards), she professed an affinity for onion rings, black cats and “Pinto games.” She also bequeathed her “Pinto Plymouth” to three female classmates: Reba Raines, Pauline Able and Barb Botos.

A year after her high-school graduation, Mary Ann’s grandparents decided to retire from the floral industry and down-size into a smaller house on Lakewood Boulevard. Emilie seized the chance to merge Finegan’s Flower Shop orders with her own and took over the Kenmore Boulevard home and retail space. She also employed Pat’s brother-in-law, Max Long -- the husband of his younger sister, Patricia -- as an in-house designer. The expanded Cottage Floral remained her bread-and-butter until 1998, when she sold the company.

It would take Mary Ann eight years to complete her undergraduate studies at the University of Akron, where she was awarded a baccalaureate degree in education on June 7, 1965. The following year, the Coventry School District hired her as a teacher at Erwine Middle School. The system later promoted her as the school’s guidance counselor, whose colleagues and students learned of her compassion for those in need. If she found a stray dog or cat, she’d take it home. One time, she dipped into her own bank account to pay for an emergency dental operation for a student whose parents couldn’t afford the bill. And after school, she umpired girls’ softball games and coached volleyball and basketball teams, stressing the importance of sportsmanship to the teen athletes.

Those attributes undoubtedly fueled an electrifying attraction in early 1982 between Mary Ann and a recently divorced Mentor woman, who had just moved to Cleveland’s West Side. Although the relationship hit the skids by late May, the pair continued to maintain intense respect and admiration for each other.

By all accounts, life was treating Mary Ann well. Besides her gratifying position at Erwine, she bought a house at 4655 Manchester Rd. in Barberton, where she lived with her mother. She was also raising four dogs, had started an antiques business on the side, and was sporting her new baby: a sporty, white Corvette two-seater. That’s why the chain of events on the night of Friday, June 4, was incomprehensible to her family and friends.

According to police reports and the ex-girlfriend’s statements to the cops, she and Mary Ann unexpectedly met in the parking lot across the street from Isis at about 11 p.m. They agreed to sit and talk for awhile in the pick-up truck. But after Mary Ann turned on the ignition to move the truck closer to the bar, a five-foot-seven-inch black man in his 20s forced open the passenger-side door. He pointed a gun at the girlfriend’s chest and barked an order at Mary Ann to drive him to a remote industrial section of the Flats. If she didn’t, he would kill her ex on the spot.

The terrifying ride ended in a field behind a warehouse at 2531 W. 4th St. near the bottom of a hill that led to the Tremont district. Once Mary Ann shut off the truck’s engine, the thug demanded both women to take off their pairs of jeans and panties. Mary Ann complied; her girlfriend refused. The man retaliated by shooting Mary Ann once in the right side of the head, instantly killing her. He then dragged the other woman to a nearby field, where he repeatedly raped her in the weeds before shooting her in the throat and right side of her chest. He also stole the women’s money and jewelry before running into the darkness.

Fifteen hours later, on Saturday afternoon, a security guard heard a soft, cat-like whimper in the brush. To his surprise, he found a beaten, bloodied woman barely alive. He called the police, who then found the truck about 45 feet away, with Mary Ann’s corpse propped upright in the driver’s seat. Officers also called for an ambulance to rush the surviving victim to Metro General Hospital on West 25th Street, where she lay paralyzed from the chest down with a bullet lodged near her spinal cord. She spent the next three months confined to a hospital bed, followed by another five months in rehab. “We were very upset,” said Sally Tatnall, the “den mother of the lesbian-separatist movement,” in March of 2009. “(Isis) was a bar we all went to. We continued to go there, but we were always careful.”

Others who met Mary Ann remembered her as a quiet, thoughtful woman with a caring disposition. And her girlfriend’s blow-by-blow account of both the crime and gunman left them speechless. “She told me that, before he shot Mary Ann, he said, ‘You don’t want to (take off your clothes)? Here’s what happens when you don’t,’” said Sandy Moore, a middle-school math and language-arts teacher who retired to Largo, Florida, in late 2004. “She also said she was scared to death that he would come back to find her. It was a brutal and terrorist attack. And it could have been any one of us. It was like a roulette kind of thing.”

Lesbians, in particular, grumbled at the police investigation when nobody was arrested. They accused detectives of conveniently putting the case on the backburner because it involved the gay community. Mary Ann’s girlfriend even confided in anyone who listened that the cops purposely kept her out of the loop. “She thought they didn’t care,” Moore said. “They didn’t search for the killer, and she was ticked. She thought they really botched it.”

An astounding 4,000 mourners gathered three days after the murder for afternoon and evening wakes at Schlup Funeral Chapel at the corner of Kenmore Boulevard and Eighth Street in Akron. The next morning, they attended a funeral mass at St. Francis DeSales Catholic Church before the casket containing Mary Ann’s body was transported to a cemetery near New Kensington for burial. Her cousin, Sandy Zdila, couldn’t understand the senseless circumstances that led to the murder. “She went out of her way for everyone. In sorting through her things, we found many cards that were obviously from the kids. They’d say something like, ‘We love you, Miss Finegan,’” she told the "Cleveland Press" before the funeral. “I just don’t believe it. Why don’t the killers kill people like themselves? Why her?”

Cleveland’s gay community thought it knew the answer: homophobia. And vicious gay bashings ran rampant in dimly lit alleys, parking lots and public parks. In the early ‘80s, Mary Ann’s murder was just one in a string of at least six deadly attacks on gays and lesbians. Even $1,000 rewards from the LGBT fundraiser, Northern Ohio Coalition, Inc., went unclaimed because nobody stepped forward with information that could have led to the killers’ convictions.

In June of 1989, the Lesbian/Gay Community Service Center of Greater Cleveland founded an assistance program and telephone hotline for victims of anti-gay violence. Slightly misspelled by its organizers, the Maryann Finegan Project marked the seventh anniversary of her death. It also linked the LGBT center to law enforcement, legal aid and social service agencies to help report and reduce the number of attacks against sexual minorities. The program was the first of its kind in Northeast Ohio. “But I don’t know that pioneer was the right word for it,” said Ed Boyte, who volunteered to answer phone calls from victims every Tuesday and Thursday nights between 1990 and 1993. “We certainly weren’t trying to be armchair therapists, but we were doing work that could have been done by social workers.”

To say the least. For starters, project co-coordinators Howard Grandon and Jeannine Petti led mandatory sensitivity-training sessions for Cleveland’s police rookies to recognize and protect the city’s gay and lesbian population from harassment and violence. They also met with representatives from the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, the Cleveland Metroparks and prosecutors’ offices throughout Northeast Ohio to establish relationships with the gay community.

Hotline workers reported the number of hate crimes to the FBI and walked victims through the legal process so that their assailants were caught, tried and convicted. They even organized a “Hatred Isn’t Magic” boycott of WMJI-FM radio, whose DJs and talk-show hosts routinely made “distorted and defamatory” anti-gay remarks, like “Picture it in your head: Two guys doing it. That, to me, is disgusting.” Verbal potshots spawned physical attacks, volunteers argued. “I knew, at the time, it was a chicken-and-egg kind of thing,” Boyte said. “This was really serious stuff we were doing. I think we raised awareness to the rest of the population by issuing a warning without being alarmists.”

But after four years, the center’s leaders felt that the numbers didn’t justify the need to continue the program on its shoestring budget. For example, in 1991 alone, hotline staff members fielded a measly 57 calls involving 109 victims from Cuyahoga, Lorain, Summit, Trumbull and Wayne counties. While supporters defended the program for recording and reporting verbal threats and physical assaults, funding was cut and the project folded. Its demise was also attributed to the overwhelming number of gay and lesbian victims, who refused to reach out for help for fear that their families, friends and co-workers would find out about their sexual orientation. “That probably wouldn’t happen today since some of the homophobia is not there now. Gay people are less likely to be worried about being outed,” said Boyte, the assistant director of the Cleveland Mediation Center since 2000. “But, hopefully, the people we assisted got the support they needed.”

Even so, Mary Ann’s murder probably would have remained unsolved, if a team of investigative news reporters from WEWS-TV 5 hadn’t questioned the more than 3,000 untested rape kits that it discovered in the Cleveland Police Department’s evidence room in 2005. Four years later, the force’s Cold Case Unit analyzed evidence that police gathered at the Finegan crime scene and made a match in the FBI’s nationwide DNA database.

County Prosecutor Mason formed the unit in 2006 with a grant that was jointly funded by the U.S. Justice Department and the office of Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. The department employed three former or retired criminal-trial supervisors, a paralegal, an investigator and two retired murder detectives. As a team, they collaborated with the police department’s homicide and sex-crimes units as well as the coroner’s office and the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. The squad worked so effectively that the federal government granted it another $500,000 in early 2010 to continue cracking unsolved crimes.

On February 10, 2010, Mason staged a news conference to announce a 16-count indictment against Richard Anthony Wilson, charging him with murder, aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery in the Finegan case. He also vowed to send the 56-year-old Florida native to death row in the Lucasville Correctional Institution in Southern Ohio.

When the story ran on the "Plain Dealer’s" website, Cleveland.com, at 7 a.m. the next day, Internet surfers weighed in on the news. Most readers called for capital punishment by injecting a “forever night shot” into Wilson’s veins. “I hope he gets what he deserves: his last meal,” wrote “Carrie.” “May he push up skunk weed,” declared “Filesaid.” “It sounds like this guy has been a cancer on society for many years,” surmised “Dawgintampa.”

News of the charges also caught the Coventry School District by surprise. After 28 years, Mary Ann’s former bosses, fellow teachers and students assumed her murder never would be solved. “She was an exceptional guidance counselor who took her job very seriously, who had a true affection for students and sympathized with their problems,” former Erwine office secretary, Judy Husted, told an "Akron Beacon Journal" reporter after Mason’s announcement. “She went way beyond what she was required to do. Her death was a traumatic event as much for the students as it was for the staff.”

Those who sympathized with the Finegan and Zdila families also reflected on the memory of Emilie, who died on October 14, 2008, at the age of 87, never knowing who killed her daughter. “I know that was something that always bothered her mother,” Husted said. “I think, for that, we were regretful that her mom was not here to know that that was taken care of. Maybe in the long run, it really is better this way.”

After nearly three decades, Mary Ann’s 16-year career at Erwine still made an emotional impact on the Coventry Township community. The system even awarded a scholarship in her name every year after her death. “The students and adults she came in contact with were her life and reason for her existence,” said Lee Ann Weisenmiller, the district’s treasurer. “A memorial scholarship was formed for high-school seniors aspiring to go to college who best exemplify her leadership, ideals and character.”

Nobody could say the same about Wilson. He was no stranger to run-ins with the law; his rap sheet dated to 1969 when he was 16 years old. In fact, he was arrested a month after Mary Ann’s murder on a charge of concealing a gun that police believed was the firearm that killed her. A test-fired bullet from the weapon proved it shared similar characteristics with a pellet that the coroner’s office extracted from Mary Ann’s body at the morgue.

At the time of the indictment, Wilson was locked up as inmate FG4199 at the 2,000-bed, maximum-security prison, the State Correctional Institution-Fayette County in LaBelle, Pennsylvania, where he was doing time for a parole violation in connection with a 2003 robbery in Erie. Court records showed he had also served a three-year-to-10-year sentence for escape and reckless endangerment in North Braddock in February of 1996 and for stealing a car in Rankin a month later. Ironically, the prison was located just 35 miles from Mary Ann’s burial site in neighboring Westmoreland County. “I never thought, after this length of time, he’d be caught,” the surviving victim said at Mason’s news conference. “I’m a witness to what he did, what he said, where he was, and certainly I will testify. And I may be nervous when I do so, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Mason applauded his investigators for solving their ninth and tenth cold cases -- those of Mary Ann and her ex -- in four years. He also boasted that, in his 11 years as Cuyahoga County’s top prosecutor, his office had scored a 90 percent conviction rate against more than 180,000 criminals, a statistic that relieved the girlfriend. “Nothing can bring back Mary Ann, but justice can be served,” she said. “At the same time, (Wilson) won’t kidnap or murder anyone else again.”

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Mary Ann Finegan was buried in Section B, Lot 68, Plot 5 of Union Cemetery, 2030 Freeport Rd. in Arnold, Pennsylvania. She was 42 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 12: David Batz

2010-06-21T16:26:00.001-07:00

The Man Who “Gave Up Time Forever”

David Batz
1944-1994

David Batz scaled the steps to the 246-foot-high summit of the Pyramid of the Sun in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan. Like his trips to England to study the Druid megaliths at Stonehenge and to France to examine the Paleolithic paintings in the caves at Lascaux, the annual spring-break trek to Mexico’s religious temples offered an “energy of nature” that he could incorporate into his artwork. The globetrotting stints of research resulted in a career that produced some of the most celebrated masterpieces of earthenware and porcelain ceramics ever designed by a Northeast Ohio artist.

From decorative tea services to matching sets of plates, bowls and cups, David’s work commanded price tags in the thousands of dollars. But his story didn’t begin at the epicenter of Cleveland’s art colony. Instead, David Elmer Batz was born on October 18, 1944, in the quaint North Central Connecticut mill town of Rockville about 10 miles south of the Massachusetts border. David’s father, Elmer A., grew up as the second of three children of a blue-collar German family in nearby Ellington, where both his dad and older brother eked out livelihoods as carpenters. The rural village also claimed native sons Francis Hall, the first American diplomat to Japan, and Faisal Alam, the founder of the Al-Fatiha Foundation for LGBTs of the Muslim faith. Meanwhile, David’s mother, the former Flora M. Schneider, was the third of four children of Russian immigrants, who ran a hardware store in the Atlantic coastal city of New London.

In the years after Elmer and Flora’s marriage in the mid-1930s, the couple became parents of two sons and three daughters, raising the family on dead-end Esther Avenue in Ellington. Until his death at the age of 60 in the summer of 1975, Elmer supported his family as a machinist in neighboring East Windsor while serving as one of two voter registrars in Ellington for most of his adult life.

David kept himself just as busy. A graduate of Ellington High School’s Class of 1962, he played in the school’s band all four years. He cheered for its basketball team, the Knights, as a member of the Pep Club during his junior year. As a senior, he was inducted into the National Honor Society and dabbled on the stage in the Drama Club. His creative juices also provided the perfect outlet in his final year to serve as the president of the Art Club and layout editor of the school’s yearbook.

In the fall of 1962 -- a month before his 18th birthday -- David started to take classes in the five-year architecture program of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Crestfallen with the length of time it took for an architect to design a building, he switched his major to ceramics a year later because of the faster speed it took to transfer the images in his head to solid works of art. Clay became his best friend “to create an object, freely alter it at will and freeze it permanently into final form,” he wrote in a 1990 news release for his installation, "Frozen in Fire."

David received his undergraduate degree in 1968 and accepted a two-year teaching fellowship in the school’s Master of Fine Arts program. Under the tutorial wings of master ceramicist Norm Schulman, he developed a passion for East Asian art, especially that of Sumi-e ink painters of China, Japan and Korea. The way they used few brush strokes to create a single image fascinated him. Once he perfected his own technique with a Sumi-e brush, he routinely decorated his pieces of clay pottery with simple insect and floral designs.

Armed with a master’s degree after his May 30, 1970, graduation, David set up stakes in Northeast Ohio as the new ceramics professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He also established and taught at the school’s satellite project in France, the Atelier Garrigues, in Garrigues-et-Sainte-Eulalie, in the Provence region north of the French Riviera and the Mediterranean coastline. There, in the summer of 1971, he stopped wearing a wristwatch. “He told me, ‘I walked out on the Pont-du-Gard one night and tossed my watch into the river. I gave up time forever,’” Cleveland Heights artist Robert Jursinski wrote in a 2000 tribute. “With the philosophers and mystics he admired -- with Buber, Camus and Ouspensky -- David believed that time was the opponent of life. He had so much to do.”

To say the least. Upon his return to his classroom duties for the autumn semester at the institute, David also displayed his art pieces at public exhibits, beginning with the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual May Show. Between 1971 and 1992, his porcelain, stoneware and copper-glazed works captivated fans at the show because of their practicality. Juries awarded him special-mention honors for his ceramics in 1972 and 1976 and for his sculptures in 1983. “They felt good, they looked good, and they had a way of connecting with numerous kinds of people. Yet, they were not so delicate as to prohibit daily use and daily enjoyment,” said Stuart Zolten, who owned the Omni Gallery in the Arcade on Euclid Avenue in the mid-’80s. “I have known few other people who had his level of enthusiasm, energy and total happiness with the art of the potter.”

David left his teaching position in 1974 for the independent life of a studio artist. He continued to present his work at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, the Columbus Museum of Art and the Museum of the College of Wooster. He also met silkscreen printmaker Susan Fiori in 1979, when she started to book him to exhibit in her eponymous gallery at 2072 Murray Hill Rd. in Little Italy. The showplace later provided the backdrop for a pivotal point in his career.

The following year, David emerged as a gay-rights activist, serving as a delegate for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force at the Democratic National Convention in New York City. He also regularly appeared on Cleveland television stations as the co-founder and vice-president of the Northeast Ohio chapter of the Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club, a nationwide group devoted to championing AIDS-awareness programs and proposed municipal gay-rights laws. “David was a visible presence in the Cleveland community at a time when others were hesitant to do so,” gay activist Bob Peppard told The Plain Dealer in 1994. “I think, for David, it went hand in hand with his artistic sensibility.”

David’s zeal for both his art and activism attracted Robert Jursinski one day in 1980, when the two met at Edward Kuban Galleries next door to the Hanna Theater on Playhouse Square. As artists streamed into the studio to drop off their pieces for an upcoming exhibit for the New Organization for Visual Arts, or NOVA, David rushed in with his contribution. “I could feel the energy in him as others had,” Robert remembered. “We finished our work and talked over coffee about art and philosophy, about travel, about everything. We kept up the conversation for 14 years.”

Committed as newfound life partners, the couple maintained a third-floor apartment on Euclid Heights Boulevard in Cleveland Heights. Meanwhile, David plunged into his work with gusto. He experimented with polychromed stoneware and unglazed porcelain to create his jaw-dropping "Totemic Structures" project. Inspired by both Native American totem poles and the Holy Roman Empire columns that he saw in Southern Europe, the whimsical pieces -- some standing more than three feet high -- featured geometric shapes, including cones, cubes and circles. “His work was so different, just so imaginative and spiritual and extremely well-spun,” said fellow potter Ann Caywood Brown, a five-year president of the Cleveland Artists Foundation in the
’90s. “I was impressed because I was never able to achieve that level of sensitivity and exuberance.”

David continued to show his ceramic and porcelain pieces around Northeast Ohio, from the Beachwood Museum of Art and FAVA Gallery in Oberlin to the Beck Center for the Cultural Arts in Lakewood and Art Space in the heart of downtown Cleveland. He also exhibited beyond Ohio’s borders with shows in New York, Chicago and suburban Baltimore. “Collectors were enthralled with the beautiful functional ware that he created during that time period,” Brown said. “(He) educated many art lovers and collectors about the aesthetic qualities to be found when the shape of the object is wed perfectly to the glaze that is used to enhance it.”

David’s boon year came in 1985, when he applied for and won a $3,875 grant from the Ohio Arts Council. He put the money to good use by producing three separate bodies of work: the "Magma Series" of stoneware pots; the "Reflection Series" of porcelain platters, bowls and vases; and the "Guardian Series" of porcelain vessels adorned with the faces of ghosts that were inspired by images drawn by his nephews and nieces. If the challenge to finish the trio of projects by the end of the grant year wasn’t enough, he also was elected to a two-year term as the president of the Murray Hill Area Arts Association in Little Italy.

In 1986, questions arose about the fate of the Fiori Gallery. Its owner was planning to marry and start a new life in San Francisco. So she asked David and Robert if they would consider taking over the business. The couple didn’t think twice; they would run the gallery for the next six years.

David, however, suffered a blow to his creativity shortly after the Fiori deal, when a doctor diagnosed him with a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome, a debilitating disease that weakens the muscles in the hand. The physician even told him to stop throwing clay pots on his spinning wheel. The order only put David in search of another medium. He settled on abaca paper.

Made from the dried leaves of a banana plant that’s native to the Philippines, Borneo and Sumatra, abaca is similar to clay in that its durability and flexibility allow an artist to shape it into functional items such as vacuum and tea bags. Its rope-like fibers also provide the sturdiness to manufacture heavier goods like clothing and carpeting. And the best part for David is that abaca shrinks when it’s in the drying process. “(It) was a medium that suited him because it had sculptural qualities akin to those of clay,” curator Rotraud “Rota” Sackerlotzky of Shaker Heights said. “Flower vases, abstract images, talking animals and animated cooking pots soon materialized on sheets of handmade paper.”

Working with abaca prompted David’s campaign to save the planet and its environment. In 1987, he collaborated with Robert to create the "Line Drawing Sculpture Series," for which they wrapped the paper around grapevines and branches to make it look like skin hanging from human bone. “These sculptures are charged with power,” David once wrote. “Their simple materials are transformed, taking on an energy source of their own.”

The "Odyssey Series" of glazed platters and impressed earthenware marked one of David’s most ambitious projects. Begun in 1988, the collection included pieces with spiritual titles like “Buddha” and “Madonna and Child.” Each part of the series addressed his fears for the environment. “It deals with our planet, Mother Earth,” he wrote. “We have abused this planet -- the air, the water, the soil -- and this series represents a pledge to the planet to help heal civilization’s wounds.”

Two years later, as David continued to add to the Odyssey anthology, he worked on his "Mad Hatter Series," an assortment of brightly glazed tea sets and vases with oversized spouts and handles that “Alice would find on the other side of the looking glass,” he said. He also began a four-year relationship with Case Western Reserve University to teach ceramics classes in its art studio. And his schedule of public exhibits seemed nonstop, with shows at places like the Valley Art Center in Chagrin Falls, the Kent State University Gallery and the Sandusky Cultural Art Center.

David returned to throwing clay in 1991 after a five-year respite. The reunion between artist and technique resulted in his next series, "New Functional Stoneware," the following year with a freshly made set of colorful platters, tiles and teapots. His regular clientele clamored for his latest pieces. “He was always a half-step away from selling $1,000 pieces to selling $10,000 pieces,” Mark Hoffman, a friend and attorney, told the "Plain Dealer" in 1994.

But David wanted to devote more time to travel and studio work. He retired as Fiori’s director in 1992 and merged the studio with Stuart Zolten’s showplace to create the Fiori-Omni Gallery. David remained on the roster as an “ artist-in-residence” while Zolten assumed the gallery’s directorship.

Relieved of the business’ day-to-day operations, he spent the rest of the year and all of 1993 producing proofs of electrostatic and photostatic prints of his "Odyssey" collection. As part of the "Odyssey Structures" package, he planned to use the two-dimensional graphics as background settings for a new earthenware series that spotlighted ancient Norse runes.

David and Robert made their last trip abroad in the summer of 1994, when they vacationed in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. At brunch on the morning of Thursday, June 23, David collapsed and died of sudden myocardial infarction, or, in layman’s terms, a massive heart attack. He wouldn’t complete his two final commissioned pieces: the doors to the arches at both St. Alban Episcopal Church on Euclid Heights Boulevard in Cleveland Heights and the Temple Israel Ner Tamid on Lander Road in Mayfield Heights. His death sent his Cleveland contemporaries into deep mourning. “He was someone you would see at every event,” Brown said. “We were pretty shocked. He was such a social, sweet, nice person. And that’s hard to come by.”

During the summer of 2000, the Cleveland Artists Foundation staged a three-month exhibit of David’s art at the Beck Center in Lakewood. Billed as "David Batz: An Impassioned Journey," the 85-piece retrospective included prints, pottery and sculptures from such collections as the "Odyssey" and "Mad Hatter" series. “There is much to see in the various iconography presented and much to interpret,” wrote Christine Fowler Shearer, the foundation’s executive director, in the introduction of an accompanying 56-page catalog. “While Batz was a potter by choice, it is our hope that all who see this retrospective will leave with a greater understanding of David Batz, the creator.”

Freelance arts critic Charles Yannapoulos didn’t quite see it that way. In a review published in "Cleveland Scene" magazine, he wrote that David’s work was “lamentable,” “insubstantial” and “tired.” He analogized the artist as part of a psychedelic movement of the late-‘60s, “with an overlay of Eastern philosophy, topped by a heaping dose of Jungian philosophy.” “Their mixture of high and low, of idealism and pessimism, was a response to the cultural ferment of the time,” he explained in his critique. “If the mainstream art world didn’t really take it seriously, other young people did. And they liked to see this stuff on album covers and on the posters that they hung in their college dorm rooms: Art to get stoned to.”

Yannapolous further trashed the exhibit as “a disappointment.” He pinned adjectives like “slapdash” and “uncaring” on David’s body of work. “During a career that spanned more than 20 years, it doesn’t seem that his vision became deeper or richer,” he railed. “It’s a faded notion…that everything an artist touches is of some value, just because he has touched it. Perhaps, this was Batz’s view.”

Curator Sackerlotzky couldn’t have disagreed more with Yannapoulos’ assessment. She summed up the pieces in the display as “haunting,” “narrative” and “powerful.” Above all else, they exemplified David’s objective to incorporate symbolism into his art to “heal our decaying civilization.” “This group of works documents not only Batz’s preoccupation with the riddle of the universe ruled by the dynamic tension between opposing forces, at once creative and destructive, but also his striving to bring the opposites into a life-preserving, harmonious balance,” Sackerlotzky said. “As an artist, Batz felt obligated to bring to our awareness the problems cultural development and civilization caused for the health of our planet, Earth.”

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David Batz was cremated by the Brown-Forward Funeral Home, 17022 Chagrin Blvd. in Shaker Heights. His remains were returned to Robert Jursinki. He was 49 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 13: Hank Berger

2010-06-21T16:23:00.001-07:00

Doctor Disco Is In

Hank Berger
1951-2006

Weekends after dark at Traxx nightclub typified the disco era of the late ‘70s in Cleveland’s Warehouse District. Just like a scene from "Saturday Night Fever," lines of revelers snaked down West Ninth Street in their clingy satin shirts, flared bell bottoms and platform shoes with two-inch heels. Once they ponied up their $2 cover charges to the doorman, they scrambled to the dance floor that glowed underneath spinning mirror balls and flashing strobe lights. And the thumping stereo speakers that flanked Larry Petrasek’s DJ booth overlooked the crowd of dancers as they boogied to the latest Donna Summer, Pointer Sisters and Lipps Inc. disco hits. “When you had access to the right records, the dancers wanted to perform,” club regular Ben Delfino of Mayfield Village remembered. “That was the only gay place I went to, because it was the hot spot.”

And rightfully so. The club trumpeted itself as the largest and most successful gay discotheque between New York and Chicago. "Rolling Stone" magazine called it the best of its kind in the country. But after its straight owner, Hank Berger, moved to Los Angeles in the midst of its success, virtually nobody knew about the controversy he stirred over Southern California’s most iconic symbol while Traxx’s reputation as party central exploded in downtown Cleveland.

Born in Lakewood on July 27, 1951, James Hank Berger was the only child of James Henry and his second wife, Joan Marie Wertz Berger. With the family’s home base at 1440 Wyandotte Ave., his father worked as a tool maker for his grandfather, Albert H., at Liberty Tool & Die at 3334 W. 46th St. in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. His mother handled the switchboard for the American District Telegraph Company in its downtown headquarters at 812 Huron Ave.

Hank, who battled chronic asthmatic attacks, was an enterprising yet restless student at Lakewood High School. Performing magic as “the Wizard” for $50 a gig didn’t exactly boost his grade point average; he had to repeat the 10th grade. In the middle of his junior year in late 1968, he dropped out of school altogether. “I felt I was wasting my time in high school,” he told Cleveland Press reporter Bonnie Schwartz in 1980. “I would have rather been out working, so I quit.”

Hank immediately enlisted for a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy, where he earned his high-school equivalency diploma. Upon his 1971 discharge during the Vietnam War, he returned to Northeast Ohio and put his movie-star looks to good use by posing for Cleveland Tux ads in newspapers and magazines. He also enrolled in the interior design-and-graphics program at the Cooper School of Art on Euclid Avenue near the Cleveland State University campus, where he graduated in 1972.

Still in school, Hank partnered with classmate Dan Fauver to open an offbeat graphics studio, the H.M.S. Titanic, at 7016 Euclid Ave. Their layouts and designs -- “funk art,“ the pair called them -- left critics either delighted or disgusted. “Hank and I didn’t want to go to an agency or an art studio and be confined to doing routine work,” Fauver said at the time. “We wanted to be able to express ourselves. About the only way you can do that is to go into business for yourself, so we did.”

Business was steady at first, thanks to Edward Noel and Jerome Turk. While Hank was taking classes at Cooper, he freelanced for the Visual Techniques co-owners, who eventually offered some of their office and studio space to him and Fauver to start their company. The mentors also promised to assign the budding entrepreneurs enough projects to take care of their share of the rent so that they could work the telephones for more clients.

The plan worked. Orders streamed into Titanic’s office. Hank himself took charge of the Dragonwyck account, designing posters for the Cleveland band’s rock shows. The relationship between artist and musicians morphed into that of manager and band, with Hank successfully booking the group as the opening act on a national Foghat-Edgar Winter tour. His career in entertainment and, by extension, nightclubs was born.

After Dragonwyck broke up in the early ‘70s, Hank pulled the plug on Titanic in 1973 and founded Hank Berger & Associates with business partner Phil Van Drasik to overhaul the aesthetic appearances of the bars where the band had performed. The clubs’ owners quickly dubbed Hank “Doctor Disco” for his uncanny methods to resuscitate financially struggling watering holes into cash cows. He reaped his rewards by drawing a salary from the clubs during their restorations and collecting a percentage of their alcohol sales for several weeks after each of them reopened. The revenue helped pay for office space in a one-story, white-stucco building at 19615 Lake Rd. in Rocky River.

Another of Hank’s earliest projects in his new venture included the televised concert, "Music, You’re My Mother: U.S. Army," which was filmed on May 22, 1975, at the 101st Airborne Division’s “Screamin’ Eagles” base at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. With Cleveland Agora founder Hank LoConti and Belkin Productions’ owner Jules Belkin as co-executive producers, Hank and Cleveland music promoter Jack Craciun III recruited musical acts like Joe Cocker, Chaka Khan and Pure Prairie League to celebrate the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon earlier in the week, which marked the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. WWWE radio-news anchor George Jay Wienbarg III -- who later worked at CNN and major radio stations in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago -- served as the master of ceremonies.

Back home, one of Hank’s most impressive trouble-shooting jobs for his nightclub clientele took place at the Déjà Vu at 1572 W. 117th St. in Lakewood. Once regarded as a run-of-the-mill shot-and-a-beer joint, the bar was revamped in 1976 with stained-glass windows, potted plants, an extensive restaurant menu and live entertainment on the weekends. Hank’s blueprint to reinvent the club was designed with his mantra for “uniqueness.” “I’ve managed both clubs and bands, worked in all phases of multimedia and have developed gut reactions about what attracts people,” he said soon after Déjà Vu’s grand re-opening. “If I don’t get any response from myself, I don’t pursue it.” (Ironically, the space became the comedy club-turned-gay bar, Bottom’s Up, in 2008.)

Hank also saw potential in the Flats of Cleveland, where he predicted that its nightspots would bustle if they simply paid more attention to their customers with better managers, menus and cocktail selections. He further envisioned an oasis of singles bars on a stretch of Center Ridge Road in Rocky River. At the same time, Hank’s dream to manage his own nightclub materialized at Traxx at 1812 Payne Ave. next door to Tackla Tavern and Restaurant and across East 18th Street from the Otis Elevator Company’s headquarters. (Cleveland State University eventually bought the block, where its soccer venue, Krentzler Field, stands today.)

Making its debut in the fall of 1976, the two-story nightclub with a rooftop patio fast became a see-and-be-seen watering hole for gay men. Interior decorator Joe Costa added to the vibe by moonlighting as the house DJ with his vinyl-record collection of the latest dance rage, disco. “It was the first place where I ever heard the Village People,” Delfino said.

Hank also found time to pop the question. On April 29, 1977, he married Rochelle “Shelley” Ann Kiehl, a statuesque blonde whose stunning beauty prompted many Traxx customers to anoint her a “trophy wife.” Despite the couple’s Ken-and-Barbie image, rumors circulated between patrons that the “Jewish mafia” was running the club. During Halloween weekend of 1977, about a year after the bar’s grand opening, fire raced through the building and burned it to the ground, sparking even more blather that the blaze was an inside job to collect insurance money.

The rumors didn’t faze Hank. Two months later on New Year’s Eve, he christened a new Traxx nightspot at 1273 W. Ninth St. in the old adult-movie theater, the Adonis, and next door to another gay club, the Vault. A gay bathhouse was also in the same block north of St. Clair Avenue.

Just 15 days before the club’s first day in business, "Saturday Night Fever" debuted in movie theaters across the country. Images of John Travolta as an uneducated Brooklyn teenager who’s the king of the dance floor were plastered on billboards, newspaper ads, even the album cover to the film’s soundtrack. And radio listeners couldn’t escape the BeeGees’ disco beats that helped generate a staggering $139.5 million at the box office.

Gays in America gravitated toward the music, and discotheques that catered to homosexuals suddenly popped up from Alaska to Florida and Maine to Hawaii. They adopted dance queens like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Amii Stewart as their disco divas. And Hank figured he could jump on the gravy train to further capitalize on the homo-fueled craze to which he had been initially exposed in the first version of Traxx.

Not that its successor came without its problems. After its New Year’s Eve party, Cleveland’s building department dispatched a team of inspectors, who ordered Hank to shutter the bar until he corrected a slew of code violations. At first, he ignored the reprimand until the city issued another shutdown notice. In February of 1978, the department approved a temporary certificate of occupancy after he finally met all of the city’s building codes.

But a month later, businessman Edward Tuckey complained to Mayor Dennis Kucinich about the red tape that the city was giving him to open a five-story disco-and-restaurant complex at 733 W. St. Clair Ave., around the corner from Hank’s club. Building inspectors refused to grant him a temporary operating permit, claiming that the building didn’t have a fire-alarm system in place. They also ordered him to enclose two stairwells that had noncombustible material in them.

The city thrived on double standards, Tuckey cried. He pointed to Traxx as an example, charging that the club had been open, despite the absence of fire-alarm and sprinkler systems. Hank countered by assuring the inspectors that he equipped the nightspot with alarms. Fire officials also told him that he didn’t need sprinklers because he only operated on one floor, he said.

Squabbles aside, word spread in gay circles that Traxx again was the place to party. The club’s appeal prompted Cleveland Magazine to name Hank one of the city’s 78 most interesting people of 1978. And by the next year, throngs of disco ducks were tearing up the dance floor to Petrasek’s catalog of chart-toppers, such as Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” France Joli’s “Come to Me” and Unyque’s “Party Down.” Delfino -- who worked as a record-label promoter for Progress Distributing in Highland Heights -- even gave the club a rare Brazilian dub of Parisian pop singer Patrick Hernandez’s “Born to Be Alive” on Brasilia Records. “The DJs were very competitive at the time,” he said. “I was giving (Hank) records nobody else had. And he treated me special by giving me free drinks.”

With the club operating at full tilt, Hank, Shelley and Wienbarg -- the same newsman who emceed the "Music, You’re My Mother" show four years earlier -- drove across the country in the winter of 1979 to sunny Southern California. While Wienbarg worked as a substitute news anchor at KMET radio, Hank marketed himself around L.A. as a disco consultant. And the pair of 28-year-olds wrote the treatment for the rock-star biopic, "When the Music’s Over: The Jim Morrison Story," for Paramount Pictures producer Robert Evans in 1980, although the project never made it to the big screen.

Hank also claimed to have dabbled as the assistant to producer Mark Buntzman in the making of the ultra-violent "The Exterminator." But "The Motion Picture Guide" -- the bible of the movie industry -- made no mention of Hank’s involvement on the 1980 project. Maybe it was a blessing; the book gave a zero-star rating to the flick about a Vietnam vet in a gang of street thugs. It underscored its dislike by warning moviegoers that it was “a film to avoid.”

Furthermore, Hank bragged that he once was Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chauffeur. He then boasted that he managed actor Frank Pesce’s career, which, up to that time, amounted to bit parts in "The Godfather: Part II," "Rocky" and "American Gigolo." (Pesce’s life later was dramatized in the 1991 film, "29th Street," which was based on the true story of him winning the first-ever New York State Lottery drawing.)

Traxx manager Jimmy Cooper, meantime, held down the fort in the Warehouse District. With no advertising or flashing neon sign in front, the club still hopped with a steady flow of customers. While gays and lesbians made up nearly 100 percent of the clientele from Sundays through Thursdays, the patronage split between 60 percent homosexual and 40 percent heterosexual on Friday and Saturday nights. And nearly everybody behaved themselves. “We want everyone to have a good time dancing and enjoying the music, gays and straights alike,” Cooper told the short-lived monthly entertainment magazine, "Disco Beat." “But those who become rowdy and try to hassle the gays aren’t welcome. We won’t tolerate troublemakers.”

Who had the time to raise an uproar? Everybody was too mesmerized with Petrasek’s talents at the turntables. A former member of the Los Angeles Thunderbirds roller-derby squad, the 27-year-old Akron native developed a following from a previous gig at another gay club in Cleveland, Bayou Landing, before Hank hired him to spin at Traxx in February of 1978. To Petrasek, disco would never die. “(It) will always be around, if for no other reason than the fact that the gay crowd likes it and will keep it going,” he said. “Gays love disco, and they love to dance and party too much for its popularity to ever diminish. There will always be a crowd wanting to get into a club like Traxx.”

As the nightclub padded his bank account in Cleveland, Hank was planting the seed of a scandal in L.A. that would bloom into an online confrontation more than 25 years later. A retired businessman would set out to tarnish Hank’s reputation. And the entrepreneur’s son would make sure of it. But to understand the accusations is to appreciate the history of a Southern California landmark: the nine-letter welcome mat that spells H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D.

In 1923, the Hollywoodland Real Estate Group wanted to promote residential properties for sale in the country’s burgeoning entertainment capital. It appealed to film director Mack Sennett and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler to foot the $21,000 price tag to erect the sign, H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D-L-A-N-D, on the side of Mount Lee, Los Angeles’ tallest peak in the Santa Monica mountain range. Each sheet-iron letter measured 30 feet wide, 50 feet high and up to 13 feet thick and was propped up by piping and wooden poles. And a network of 4,000 light bulbs was wrapped around the letters and synchronized to blink “HOLLY,” then “WOOD, then “LAND” that could be seen from as far as 25 miles away.

The sign made headlines on September 16, 1932. That’s when Welsh-born actress Peg Entwistle scaled a workman’s ladder to the top of the “H” and jumped to her death, despondent that she couldn’t impress RKO studios in her only film, Thirteen Women, after a successful run on the Broadway stage throughout the ‘20s. Like Entwistle’s state of mind, the sign started to deteriorate at the dawn of the Depression.

By 1939, the Hollywoodland realty company went belly up, and all maintenance on the sign came to a screeching halt. Thieves stole all the 20-watt bulbs. Vandals chipped away pieces of the letters. The structure had turned into an eyesore, and most of the town’s homeowners wanted their leaders to tear it down. To rescue Hollywood’s most recognizable symbol from demolition, the 455 acres of land that surrounded it were quit-claimed to the city of Los Angeles in 1944.

But even with L.A. as the sign’s caretaker, it wasn’t enough to save parts of the towering structure. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce permanently removed the last four letters. Pyromaniacs set fire to the bottom of the second “L;” the top of the “D” fell to the ground; and the second “O” collapsed into a pile of rubble. The sign was literally toppling off the hill. Still, the city’s cultural-heritage board declared the landmark a historic monument in 1973. But to residents, it was nothing more than a hunk of junk.

So, in true Tinseltown spirit, the Hollywood Sign Trust Fund was established in 1978 to raise money for a new sign. Celebrities dipped into their wallets to “adopt” all nine letters for $27,777 apiece to raise a quarter-million dollars for its installation. Singing cowboy Gene Autry sponsored the second “L.” Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner called dibs on the “Y.” Rocker Alice Cooper chipped in his donation for the last “O” in memory of Groucho Marx. A benefit at Hefner’s fabled mansion later that year raised enough cash to erect a sign made of a more durable steel. Its unveiling coincided with the 75th anniversary of Hollywood’s founding.

Days later, Hank was watching a television news report of helicopters transporting the sheet metal from the old sign off Mount Lee to a warehouse in Orange County. The thought of chopping it up into pieces and hawking thumb-sized keepsakes of it crossed his mind. He called the chamber and offered to pay $10,000 for licensing rights and donate a 15 percent share of his profits. The two sides struck a deal, and the original landmark -- all 480,000 pounds of it -- was his. And Wienbarg was drafted to help haul the sign from the warehouse to the backyard of Hank’s home in the Hollywood Hills, where they could turn the pieces into souvenirs and market them to the masses. “Instead of just cutting up this veritable legend and passing it around, why not make a really nice commemorative item out of it?” Hank told "People" magazine in July of 1980. “If sold properly, it would be worth millions.”

In a ceremony near Mount Lee a couple of weeks after the magazine hit the stands, Hank launched a line of plaques that featured 1.25-square-inch chunks of the sign affixed to art-deco lithographs. Each wall hanging also sported a tinted color photograph of the sign in its heyday alongside a printed timeline of its history. Hank presented the first in a series of 50,000 numbered pieces to Director Jean Firstenberg of the American Film Institute to display in the agency’s headquarters. He also gave a plaque to President and former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who reciprocated with a thank-you note. Hank thought he had hit a bonanza. “The sign is the epitome of Hollywood, and it was Hollywood’s logo for 55 years,” he said at the time. “Some people may never get a chance to visit Hollywood. But they can own a piece of it, literally, when they have one of these. There are film buffs all over the world that this will appeal to.”

All told, Hank only sold about 14,000 plaques for $29.95 apiece in department stores across the country, including May Company. Because of fizzling sales, he stopped manufacturing the plaques in 1982. And he left the rest of the sign in storage for the next 25 years. Besides, he was planning to open yet another discotheque, the Probe in Hollywood, to add to his stable of other business interests in Northeast Ohio, such as his “dance-a-teria,” Hank’s Café, on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he reasoned about the unsold parts of the sign.

But by 1984, Hank wanted to revamp his life. He dismantled his Traxx empire that year. He shut down the Probe a year later, after the Southern California DJ Association ranked it the best disco club in the region. And in 1987, he and Shelley -- who, by then, had given birth to two sons, Justin Henry and Max Albert -- moved back to the Cleveland area after nearly a decade on the West Coast and opened Club Metropolis in the Flats.

Hank then partnered with Bert Manning in 1990 to found Berger Business Brokerage, which became a powerful consulting firm to many Northeast Ohio nightspots, including the Phantasy in Lakewood and the latest hotspot in gay discos, U4ia, on Berea Road. In his spare time, he coached his sons’ baseball teams in the Rocky River Little League between 1990 and 1995.

Hank eventually masterminded the sale of Peabody’s Downunder across from the Cleveland State campus on Euclid Avenue. Its owner, Dan Bliss, wanted to sell his portfolio of downtown Cleveland nightclubs to pursue his dream of making movies in Los Angeles. Consequently, one of Hank’s business deals in the City of Angels would come back to haunt him.

In 2003, a year before Bliss produced his popular poker tutorial, "Wise Guys On: Texas Hold ‘Em," on DVD, Hank told his 32-year-old client that he owned the Hollywood sign, and it was mothballed in a self-serve storage unit near L.A. Bliss flipped out. He couldn’t believe that a piece of Americana was languishing in a dark, dank warehouse. So he made a “six-figure” offer to take the “Humpty Dumpty version of the Hollywood sign” off Hank’s hands.

Bliss then broke apart more pieces off the letters and embedded star-shaped bits of them into kitschy necklaces, make-up compacts and key chains. He also assured that Hank would pocket a percentage of the profits, if any of the merchandise was sold on Bliss’ specially-designed website, AuthenticHollywood.com. “The sign symbolizes fame, fortune and glamour,” he gushed to a Copley News Service reporter. “People can wear it close to their hearts.”

But Bliss apparently wanted to make a few quick bucks in 2005 to produce a documentary about Elvis Presley. He sold a 15-square-foot chunk of the “H” to the Hollywood History Museum for $11,766. Five private investors also forked over cash for other pieces of the landmark. Bliss then put the rest of the sign up for auction on eBay with a reserve starting bid of $300,000, meaning he wouldn’t take anything less for it. “Unless the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty are put up for sale, this will be your last chance to own one of the world’s most famous structures,” he told a Canadian media outlet. “There are six pairs of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. There is only one Hollywood sign.”

Listing #5640511574 stayed online for 10 days, before the auction ended on December 6. It mustered a high bid of $450,000, an amount that “pleased” Bliss. Too bad the offer proved bogus. But a phone call to a retired entrepreneur living in the Northern Rockies wasn’t.

In 1978, businessman Tony Wood claimed he was driving to his telecommunications company in La Mirada southeast of L.A., where he looked to the side of the road and saw demolition crews taking down the last remnants of the dilapidated sign. If nobody else wanted the rubble, he and business partner Bob Jones could make jewelry from it and sell the pieces to nostalgia freaks. They’d even wrap each bauble in a drawstring pouch of velvet and throw in an accompanying booklet that told the story of Entwistle’s suicidal jump.

So Wood said he brokered a deal with the Chamber of Commerce to buy the sign for $10,000 and donate 15 percent of the profits back to the city for the new sign’s upkeep. He even negotiated a contract with retail giant May Company to sell 15,000 necklaces in the shape of Mount Lee for $19.99 each in its chain of department stores. (Does all of this sound eerily familiar?)

But within a year, Wood’s telecomm firm filed for bankruptcy. And the feds padlocked and chain-linked an outside storage area behind his company with the sign, poles and anchors in it. Or so everybody thought.

Fast-forward to 2005. Quietly retired and modestly living in the Montana wilderness, Wood received a telephone call from a buddy, who congratulated him for auctioning off the sign for $450,000 on eBay. He told his friend that he had no idea what he was talking about. But after he tracked down the seller on the Internet, he discovered that Bliss had bought the sign from Hank. An online feud emerged.
Wood’s son, Stuart, engineered the war of words on Scams.net in 2006. On the website, he accused Hank of fraudulently obtaining the sign in 1978 by breaking into the back of his dad’s former business and hauling away the metal scraps. “In those days, bankruptcies of companies were a dime a dozen all over the country,” he blogged on the website. “One could easily steal high-value items without the courts ever knowing.”

The younger Wood then cited a 2005 article in the "San Diego Tribune," in which reporter Norma Meyer interviewed Hank about his reasons for storing it in obscurity in the corner of a tool-and-die company after his projections to sell 50,000 mementos didn’t pan out. He told her that he “forgot I even owned the damn thing.” After he read the story, Wood was stunned. “How do you forget you have the Hollywood sign?” he rhetorically asked. “Didn’t anyone bother to research this guy? For goodness’ sake, Mr. Berger should write a memoir!”

Better yet, the "Cleveland Free Times" decided to take up Wood and his dad on their plea to investigate “this exposed fraud.” In a June 7, 2006, story, writer James Renner described his meeting in Hank’s Bay Village mansion at 24446 Lake Rd. During the interview, the former “Doctor Disco,” now wracked with excruciating back pain after recent surgery, admitted he paid about $80,000 in fees over the years to keep the sign in storage. He confirmed that Bliss was sharing a percentage of profit of the sign with him. And he adamantly refuted Tony Wood’s story that he wasn’t the rightful owner of it. His bulging scrapbook of news clippings from "People," "Time" and "Us Weekly" magazines proved his point. “I just think this guy (Wood) saw it on eBay and thought he was entitled to a piece of it,” Hank said. “But he can kiss my ass. I’m Hollywood Hank.”

For three more months, Hank stuck to his story. Then, in late-October, his lifelong battle with asthma escalated, and he was rushed to Lakewood Hospital for breathing problems. Four days later, on Tuesday, October 31, he died, just a few months before Bliss sold the sign to Minneapolis relief sculptor Bill Mack. He also left a lasting legacy among Cleveland’s LGBT community. “Gay people have always been attracted to the big cities because you weren’t going to find what you were looking for in Podunk, Ohio,” Delfino said. “You had to wait and wait to get a drink in Traxx. There was nothing that could compare to Hank’s clubs.”

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Hank Berger’s body was cremated at the Jenkins Funeral Chapel & Crematory, 2914 Dover Center Rd. in Westlake. His remains were buried in Section 26, Lot 44, Plot 3 of Sunset Memorial Park, 6245 Columbia Rd. in North Olmsted. He was 55 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 14: Aubrey Wertheim

2010-06-21T13:55:00.001-07:00

The Sensitive Flower

Aubrey Wertheim
1953-2003

The U.S. Supreme Court decision of June 30, 1986, infuriated Aubrey Wertheim. As the director of services for the Fund for Human Dignity division of the National Gay Task Force in New York City, he couldn’t grasp the 5-to-4 vote that upheld a Georgia law to make gay sex between consenting adults illegal. So he marched into a Western Union office two days later and fired off a mailgram to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Associate Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis F. Powell Jr., William Rehnquist and Byron White, all of whom voted in favor of the law. “It is ironic this close to Independence Day (that) you choose to deny freedom to one out of 10 Americans,” he wrote in the telegram. “As a gay man, I’ve always held the Constitution revered for the civil liberties of all Americans. Clearly, the present court chooses to differ with that document and, with this shameful vote, shows it has great difficulty separating the judicial from the prejudicial.”

Ever since he was born on August 14, 1953, Aubrey always managed to author fighting words that made his points crystal clear. Born Robert Sorin Wertheim, he was the younger child and only son of Robert and Mildred “Millie” Sorin Wertheim, who raised their family at 7272 Scenic Point in a secluded cul-de-sac of Sagamore Hills Township. His father ruled the food industry, first running the family-friendly Wertheims’ Chick Inn in Northfield Center Township from 1947 to 1965, then co-founding the popular Pewter Mug restaurant chain with two business partners in 1962. The Northeast Ohio Restaurant Association even named him “Restaurateur of the Year” in January of 1981. He retired in 1990, after he and surviving co-founder Al Bernstein sold their flagship restaurant near Cleveland’s Public Square to make way for a proposed 60-story Ameritrust Center, a project that never made it further than the drawing board.

At home, “Bobby’s” mother instilled in her son a passion for the written word as a freelance humorist, who submitted “Milliegrams” to such publications as "Reader’s Digest" and "Christian Science Monitor." His older sister, Peggy, also showed an artistic flair by designing silk kimonos, tunics, shawls and scarves in Fort Lauderdale in the early ‘80s before she returned to Sagamore Hills Township to sell real estate.

Bob, meanwhile, ventured into the theater. As a student at Nordonia High School, he starred in such drama-club productions as "Becket" before he graduated in 1970. He then majored in theater during his freshmen year at Ohio University and landed a summer apprenticeship at the old Musicarnival in Warrensville Heights in 1971. But he discovered he was more attracted to playwriting than acting. In 1974, he moved to New York, rented a $120-a-month apartment and eked out a meager living as a typist, chauffeur, usher and casting assistant while pursuing his dream on the Great White Way. Like most aspiring playwrights, he quickly grew accustomed to “ingratiating yourself into a theater and working your way up,” he told Plain Dealer reporter James Ewinger in 1984.

He also adopted the sobriquet, “Aubrey,” as his stage name. And he maintained a regimen of prolific letter-writing sessions to his parents. Routinely lengthy and often peppered with wry wit and sarcasm, the correspondence chronicled his trials and tribulations in the Big Apple. “Perhaps it’s a childhood fantasy of mine, but I’ve always thought theater should begin the moment one enters the lobby, just like temples and schools and government buildings,” he wrote in a February 16, 1976, letter. “Let the building be costumed and trumped and lit, for such is the nature of the business.”

Nearly a year passed before Aubrey got his big break on the off-Broadway stage in the Encompass Theatre of Brooklyn with his comedy, "Pranks." During the first two weeks of 1977, he auditioned scores of actors for several roles, including one that he based on pioneering Cleveland broadcaster Dorothy Fuldheim. He fretted the audition process. “We start casting this week, which I’m sure shall be dreadful,” he wrote on January 5. “Hearing my lines thoroughly mangled by 200 actors I’m sure will devaluate my affection for them (the lines, not the actors).”

Aubrey wrote another letter to his parents a week later, by which time the auditions had drained him of any thought that he could pull off the play in front of an audience. The problem simply stemmed from his inability to find performers with a keen sense of comedic timing. “I refuse to believe the scenes aren’t funny enough. If I made them any broader, we would have to add pies to the prop list,” he bemoaned. “One actress even expressed sensual excitement with a line about a man being ‘Neanderthal in bed.’ And another actress completely surprised us by reading the same line as ‘non-ethereal in bed.’”

Needless to say, "Pranks" flopped after a handful of performances. Aubrey blamed part of its failure on miscast actors, especially the gal chosen to play the short, stout and homely Fuldheim role. He retreated for a time-out in Sagamore Hills Township to house-sit for his parents, who were traveling to Israel. In an April 18, 1977, letter addressed to “the Midwestern Mideasterners,” he soothed his artistic wounds with an “I-told-you-so” rant. “Dorothy Fuldheim is going to be on TV Thursday,” he wrote. “So I can finally show all those idiots at the Encompass why the part I patterned after her couldn’t be played by a handsome woman in her 30s.”

Aubrey then described his new $8-a-show job as a “john attendant” for the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of David Langston Smyrl’s "On the Lock-In," a “harmless little number about some men in jail, each with his particular story or complaint.” The play, produced by Joseph Papp’s legendary Public Theater, ran for less than two months on the LuEsther Hall stage. “This is the show I am currently incarcerated in,” he wrote. “I am mightily thumb-screwed with lines like this: ‘Ain’t no ballgame no fun if you don’t know the players.’ A quadruple negative is enough the make the strongest man crack. I’ve decided to eat enough programs to poison myself.”

Besides providing blow-by-blow accounts of his fledgling career, Aubrey’s letters also revealed an intense, unconditional love for his mother, whom he often called “my dearest friend.” His graphic descriptions of rare trips to “dingy” gay-movie houses clearly demonstrated an unabashed openness about his homosexuality to her. For example, a September 11, 1977, missive painted an unusual encounter four nights earlier, when he sat next to a thirtysomething Englishman named Gary, who was vacationing in New York. The pair whispered to each other about the movie’s “absurd” plot. (“Ridiculous business with a man and a telephone cord,” Aubrey wrote.) They left the theater, stopped for a cup of tea and talked about the Londoner’s longtime career as a Royal Ballet Company dancer. “In a lull between small talks, I suddenly decided and put it to him in my flattest prose: ‘Do you want to go home with me?’” Aubrey confided in his mom. “Well, I have since discovered my sex education to be completely supervised by clods. The mere bump-and-grind, rush-hour, push-comes-to-shove school. It really burns me now to think how totally wasted I was in my past two experiences. What clumsy, unqualified lovers they were!”

Aubrey softened his diatribe by explaining that he and his new paramour spent 10 hours in bed in “one long, long, endless river of making love.” In between sessions of “nothing but our hands playing little Braille games with each other,” they talked about meeting in the movie house, their attraction to each other and the differences between American and British perceptions of gays in society. “Is it too, too much to desire a partner with whom one can talk of artistic things?” he asked. “I’ve never presumed myself intelligent -- thought has always come so hard for me -- but I have made myself aware somewhat of my cultural heritage. And it comes as such comfort when one finds another where that appreciation is equaled and, even better, exceeded.”

Naturally, Aubrey’s letter floored Millie, even if she did unconditionally accept her only son being gay. She wrote back, asking why he had to be so explicit in describing his sexual encounters. He attributed it to her raising a “sensitive flower.” “I’m an artist, a creator, who has to have the feedback, be it plays or relations,” he wrote on September 22. “I have to know, even more, be reassured. I shan’t disguise the fact I consider myself somewhat unique. (It’s) partly my own doing, partly what was done to me. I don’t regret the (gay) classification. I often revel in it.”

Aubrey argued that his “revelations” indicated a mindset about gay relationships that had been previously fanned by fantasies. Until Gary, he hadn’t experienced an erotically homosexual connection with anyone. Furthermore, he confessed that he had no close friendships with men in the city. “The two men I slept with earlier were such pathetic lovers that it was I who brought myself to orgasm-seducing my own self into it as it were,” he explained to his mother. “And I thought, how awful it really is, this homosexual sex: awkward and unsatisfying (I really thought this!). And I was really beginning to resign myself to the futility of it all (and, thus, the necessity of fantasy) when this ‘new chap’ came along.”

Aubrey ended the seven-page, handwritten letter with a bombshell: He was flying to England with Gary a little more than two weeks after meeting him. He wrote his first letter from Europe on October 5. After a week in London, the couple had browsed through the city’s Portobello Road market, with its stalls of clothes, books, china and silver. They took in a lecture on the aesthetic influences of a Whistler art exhibit at the Tate Gallery, where Great Britain’s national art collection was displayed. They also toured Kensington Palace and Hyde Park, where thousands of migrating birds impressed Aubrey for “flying on the same wavelength.” The trip ended with a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Wild Oats and a “tiresome” Shaw Theater run-through of Landslide with Deborah Kerr.

Aubrey realized that his new relationship ran the gamut of emotions, from generous, explorative and spiritual to clumsy, destructive and undermining. He thought Gary’s British sensibilities often led to his feelings being “put out to sea.” Still, “the world turns very well at present,” he wrote. “He’s as good a lover as I suspected. And the apprenticeship I’m serving will undoubtedly serve me for some time. But sex aside, there are still so many facets of his personality I take immeasurable pleasure in as well as ruts in the road, which frustrate me more than I can bear at times.”

No correspondence survives to document the relationship’s life span. But it’s safe to say that it ran its course by 1982, when Aubrey began to juggle time as both a playwright and activist for the National Gay Task Force in its offices at 80 Fifth Ave. A volunteer at first, he was eventually hired as the agency’s director of services at a time when the task force was going through amazing expansion spurts. “As our movement grows larger, the traditional pursuit and visibility are no longer enough,” Executive Director Virginia Apuzzo said at the time. “We need to move from access to responsiveness and from visibility to full participation. We must not just think, but do.”

To accomplish her goals, she brought on board Jeff Levi as the task force’s first lobbyist in Washington. He also was the first activist in the nation to focus on issues linked to Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, or GRID, a “mysterious fever” that had killed nearly 300 gay men and infected another 800 nationwide by the end of 1982. Because the name of the disease implied it only affected homosexuals, Apuzzo and Levi both successfully urged the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to change the designation to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.

At the same time, Aubrey established “Circles,” the first-ever toll-free hotline in the United States for AIDS information. He also took part in other agency directives, such as the launch of the first crisis hotline to combat anti-gay violence, which conducted a nationwide survey to track hate crimes and report them to the U.S. Justice Department. AIDS fundraisers soon followed. Aubrey was earning $11,269 a year.

His scriptwriting was paying off, too. In 1980, he submitted 11 play proposals to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The renowned theater eventually bought the rights to a one-act story that never made it to the stage after all. Instead, after four years of negotiations, PBS chose to air his play about a museum director’s romance with an anesthesiologist. With Mimi Kennedy and Jeff Goldblum in the leading roles, "Popular Neurotics" was broadcast on the network’s American Playhouse series on February 14, 1984.

Later in the year, Aubrey applauded the task force, when it received its first round of federal funding for community-based AIDS service agencies. And to make itself all-inclusive to both sexes, the organization changed its name to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. It also revamped its objective to willingly negotiate AIDS drug-testing programs with the Federal Drug Administration as well as to endorse militant demonstrations in Washington over the sudden spike in the number of hate crimes. “For several years, we have pressed the federal government to respond to the violence, yet the actual response has been denial and neglect,” fumed Levi, who had been promoted to executive director by 1985.

Aubrey also returned to Cleveland that year to speak at a Black & White Men Together meeting to groan about the lack of solidarity within the gay community. He equated the human-rights movement to a teenager, who was still learning the ropes 16 years after the Stonewall riots of 1969, when demonstrators protested a police raid of a gay bar in Greenwich Village. He specifically called Cleveland a “grudge country.” “That’s what I say to myself when I feel the plane easing into Hopkins Airport,” he told the crowd. “When I get here, I’m usually dealing with five percent progress to 95 percent grousing. It has to stop now. We no longer can squabble and separate into little cliques and contingents like adolescents, because this demands an adult response. And forget 16-years ago since Stonewall. The heat is on. We have to graduate.”

Aubrey then spoke in June at the National Volunteer Management Conference on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles. During the workshop, “Networking With Nontraditional Volunteer Communities,” he pleaded with managers of mainstream church groups, health-care hotlines and counseling services to include gays, lesbians and their supporters as clients and volunteers. Although there were 44 community centers, 174 hotlines, 250 college clubs, 136 newspapers and more than 200 Alcoholics Anonymous groups catering to the LGBT community nationwide, it wasn’t enough, he argued. “Despite this seemingly glowing success story, that fact is what we offer is woefully inadequate,” he said. “Most parts of the country have absolutely nothing for gays and lesbians. The smallest effort can make the greatest difference in changing attitudes, retiring very tired stereotypes, removing the stigma associated with gays and lesbians. We have always been beside you serving. We have always been there among those you serve. Wouldn’t it serve all of us better if we could tell you our names?”

Then there was Aubrey’s infamous tirade by telegram after the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in favor of Georgia’s sodomy laws. The vote resulted in the first organized LGBT demonstration against the high court, at which an estimated 5,000 protestors descended on the nation’s capital to rally against its decision. By the end of the year, the task force had convened at the Southeastern Gay and Lesbian Conference in Atlanta to try and repeal the law.

But Aubrey decided the time had come to move back to Northeast Ohio, where he could replicate his New York mission in the Midwest. So, in 1989, the Lesbian-Gay Community Center of Greater Cleveland hired him as its $18,000-a-year director of services. His first significant contribution to the center was the creation of the youth group, Presence and Respect for Youth in Sexual Minority, or PRYSM, for which the editors of the Gay People’s Chronicle bestowed upon him its annual Community Service Award in January of 1990.

In the June 17, 1990, issue of the "Plain Dealer," Aubrey wrote an op-ed piece whose timing coincided with Cleveland’s Gay Pride Festival that weekend. With a theme of why he was proud of being gay, his article cited famous homosexuals -- from Michaelangelo and Alexander the Great to Gertrude Stein and Martina Navratilova -- who had “graced our side of the fence.” He cheered on the steps that gays and lesbians had taken to become empowered and respected in mainstream society. And he argued for equal rights for all Americans, regardless of their sexual orientations. “Heterosexuals take it for granted that the right to love and pursue happiness through relationships is an automatic given in modern-day life,” he wrote. “What we celebrate is our individual and community’s triumph over hate and persecution. What we demand is the return of our birthright to hold another (human) being freely, to be held without fear.”

Aubrey continued to roll up his sleeves and institute new programs at the center, even though it grappled with a paltry $32,000 annual budget. He organized the Mary Ann Finegan Project to help train rookie police officers on LGBT issues and report hate-crime statistics to the FBI. He also founded the Living Room, which was the first-ever drop-in center in the Midwest for people with AIDS and HIV. And he helped organize monthly community “salons” to brainstorm gay issues.

On the side, Aubrey kept up his playwriting. He produced the first act of his latest piece, "Make Way for Dyklings," at Cleveland Public Theater every Thursday through Sunday between February 7 and February 24, 1991. Directed by Amanda Shaffer, the play swapped stage time with another one-act, Geralyn Horton’s "Talking Politics," in a double bill under the lesbi-friendly title, "Girls Into Women."

But by the fall of 1993, the strain of running the center while struggling to write scripts began to show. In a September 18 letter to fellow activist “Julia of the Spirit,” Aubrey vented his frustrations about both his job and inability to shop around Dyklings to a theatrical market larger than Cleveland because of “false leads and bogus producers.” “I do love just doing the youth group,” he wrote. “In many ways, I am decidedly over organizing the Cleveland community, a more disenfranchised, discombobulated and unaware collection of homothexuals (sic) you could not find outside of, perhaps, Bosnia.”

Aubrey turned in his resignation a few months later in 1994 to concentrate on the theater. He became a member of both the Dramatist Guild and the Cleveland Play House’s Playwrights Unit. And in a house he shared with a roommate and his dog, Malique, at 3053 West Blvd. on Cleveland’s West Side, he successfully negotiated to stage "Dyklings" at the Washington D.C. Art Center. The play was ultimately nominated for the theater’s Helen Hayes Award for “Best Original Play.“ It eventually was presented at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts in 1996 and the Lambda Theater in Sacramento in 2000.

One of Aubrey’s dramas, "Genuine Article," about newspaper columnist Fannie Fern received sparkling reviews after it premiered at the First Night Festival in Columbus in 1996 and the Cleveland Play House a year later. And his last work, "Captivity," put Alzheimer’s disease under a microscope after his mom, Millie, was diagnosed with the memory-erasing illness in the mid-‘90s.

Aubrey himself would be rattled with a physician’s news that he had developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2001. For two years, he tried to stave off the effects to treat the cancer. Regardless, the Wertheim family was hit with devastation twice in less than two weeks. On December 29, 2002, 83-year-old Millie died at Pine Valley Care Center in Richfield Township. At Metro Health Medical Center in Cleveland 11 days later, the lymphoma took Aubrey’s life on Thursday, January 12, 2003. “In the ‘80s, I fought AIDS. In the ‘90s, I fought Alzheimer’s. And for the last two years, I have been fighting lymphoma,” he told his doctor shortly before he died. “I am tired.”

Aubrey was the third in a line of gay activists in Cleveland to die in three weeks, following the deaths of 54-year-old Ron Rooy, who ran the New Hope Alternative Therapy Group, and 45-year-old Joe Carroccio, who led the Cleveland chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP. After Aubrey’s death, mourners remembered him as a “balanced and compassionate man.” “He was looking to advance the agenda of equal rights and protection while building relationships and empowering people,” said Ed Boyte, a former board member for the center and manager of its Mary Ann Finegan Project. “And he did it all while having a great time.”

---

Aubrey Wertheim’s body was cremated at Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery, 26200 Aurora Rd. in Bedford Heights. His remains were returned to his father. He was 49 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

Chapter 15: Robbie Kirkland

2010-06-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

"It's Hard to Be Gay"

Robbie Kirkland
1982-1997

Ask any gay teenager who’s coming to grips with his or her sexual orientation. More than likely, the teen talks about an emotional struggle with inner demons in a Bible-thumping society that has drilled into a youngster’s head that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral. To make matters worse, homophobes point to a preposterous argument that the gay community teems with pedophiles who recruit children into their fold.

To stamp out the stigma of teen homosexuality in the 21st century, many Northeast Ohio high schools and colleges have instituted counseling programs for gay students who are wading through a sea of questions to understand and accept their sexuality. Outside the halls of academia, the Metro Youth Outreach project of the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland is among several after-school programs that provide safe havens for the youngest members of the gay community. Many of these groups are byproducts of Robbie Kirkland’s internal grappling with his homosexuality and the heartbreaking suicide that ended it.

Born February 22, 1982, in University Hospitals on Cleveland’s East Side, David Reid-Robertson “Robbie” Kirkland was the third child and only son of John David Reid-Robertson and Leslie Powell Kirkland. The paternal side of his family was so proud of its Scottish heritage that, by ancestral tradition, it christened its newborn boys with names that honored their grandfathers.

To outsiders, Robbie’s parents seemed like a happy and well-adjusted couple. John -- a native of Tuxedo, New York, near the site of the 1970 Woodstock music festival -- met the Massachusetts-bred Leslie while both were stationed in the Army in Idaho. They married in 1976, the same year they relocated to Cleveland’s West Park neighborhood so that John could attend Case Western Reserve University’s law school. After he passed the bar exam, he joined the FBI’s downtown headquarters as an agent. Meanwhile, Leslie gave birth to Danielle in 1977 and Claudia in 1979.

Six miscarriages followed, before the couples’ marriage started to disintegrate three years later. While Leslie endured a difficult pregnancy with Robbie, John carried on an affair with a woman in his office. The Kirklands separated, and their divorce became final in August of 1982, a mere six months after their son’s birth. Leslie remarried two years later to Kaiser Permanente nephrologist Dr. Peter Sadasivan and moved to Wildwood Lane in Strongsville, where Robbie affectionately referred to his stepfather as “dad.” In 1992, the Sadasivans became parents of their own daughter, Alexandria.

Leslie and her Indian-born husband taught the four children to respect everyone’s race, religion and sexual orientation. She once hired a lesbian couple to hang wallpaper in their home, telling the kids beforehand that it was all right if they saw the women give each other a kiss or a hug. But Robbie picked up mixed signals away from home. In the third grade at Sts. Joseph & John Interparochial School in Strongsville, he discovered that not everybody regarded others with the same level of respect. “Our family loved, supported and accepted him, but could not protect him from the rejection and harassment he experienced at his Catholic schools or his overall perception of how society and religion view homosexuality,” she said. “I could see it. His pants were torn. He had scratches. We would pray that everything would get better.”

One day, Robbie told his mom that he wanted to transfer to another school because of his classmates’ taunts. So she enrolled both him and Claudia in Incarnate Word Academy in Parma Heights, where Danielle was already a student. Between the fourth and eighth grades, Robbie excelled at his schoolwork, bringing home stellar report cards. His classmates even elected him to a seat on the school’s Student Council. Still, a handful of bullies continued to mock him. “Robbie was soft-spoken, gentle, creative and disliked sports,” Leslie remembered. “Robbie made many efforts to fit in with the other boys, such as participating in sports and pretending to have crushes on girls. It wasn’t enough. He was still perceived as gay and encountered teasing and harassment, usually out of the teacher’s view.”

Robbie started to write poetry in 1994, ostensibly to document his confusion over his pubescent sexuality. One piece, "The End of My Life," foretold his master plan:

It nears
I’m dying and no one cares
The pain the pain
THE PAIN!
I scream in pain!
My body shakes in violent spasms
I cry out in pain again!
I scream
My blood pours like a stream
I’m dying and no one cares
I scream in pain one last time
And then it’s over
I am dead and no one cares
Note: A lot of stuff in here is weird like this
I’m not really like that

Robbie found solace during the summers, when he connected with other Catholic-raised kids at Camp Christopher in Bath Township. He swam and canoed on Lake Marian. He designed and created jewelry in arts-and-crafts workshops, often giving his pieces to family and close friends. He also connected with Jenine Coffman, a freshman at Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School. In January of 1996, he wrote her a letter in which he proclaimed, “Guess what? I’m happy!” Then, he explained his predicament. “I’ll tell you why people make fun of me,” Robbie wrote. “You see, I talk different. You know I have a slight lisp (s’s come out th’s). And I’m kinda, well, sucky at sports. So people have called me gay. They don’t mean it cuz, if they did, I’d be beat up by now. You see everyone in our school is, like, homophobic (including me).”

At about the same time, the Sadasivans signed up for Internet service with the provider, America On Line, or AOL. Unfortunately, the couple didn’t make it a practice to monitor Robbie while he was surfing online. He told them he was playing games, instant-messaging friends in teen chat rooms and doing research for his homework. But truthfully, he was logging onto gay websites to meet men, including a Pennsylvania guidance counselor who sent him an XXX-rated video of himself. When his parents received the AOL bill -- the service was charging its users by the hour at the time -- they were floored. They immediately banned Robbie from using the computer. But the punishment didn’t stop him. To talk to other gays, he resorted to calling costly 1-900 telephone numbers designed for adult entertainment.

Nearly two months later, Peter discovered files of gay pornography on the family computer. Robbie denied he was homosexual, when his parents asked him. And before he went to sleep that night, he wrote a suicide note and ingested an entire bottle of Tylenol painkillers, only to wake up and vomit the 30 tablets a few hours later. On February 26, four days after his 14th birthday, he sent Coffman another letter. “The reason why I tried to kill myself was because of stuff that happened that would fill a novel,” he wrote. “I’ll tell you a shortened version: 1. Every day now, I fear for my life. 2. I fear online. 3. Something weird is going on with me and God. I don’t like church masses (but) I still have faith in God. One and two are connected.”

A month passed before “the worst day of my entire life,” Leslie said. On March 29, Robbie ran away from home, hopped on a Greyhound bus and rode to Chicago to meet a man with whom he had been clandestinely meeting in a chat room. The thought of Robbie being forced into a world of child prostitution petrified Leslie. In a bizarre twist of fate 24 hours later, a homeless man directed her son to a policeman, who called her at 3 a.m. to tell her he had found Robbie. John Kirkland drove to the Windy City to bring his only son home. “I was relieved and thankful to God to hear that Robbie was safe,” Leslie said. “We immediately took (him) to a counselor, who, with Robbie’s permission, confirmed our suspicions that he was gay.” The psychiatrist also said that the boy was not happy about his revelation.

Robbie’s parents, stepfather and sisters immediately accepted his disclosure of his sexual orientation. Dealing drugs and robbing innocent people at gunpoint would upset his dad; homosexuality would not. “I told him honestly, ‘Some people are not going to like you because of this, Rob,’” John told "Gay People’s Chronicle" reporter Doreen Cudnik in a 1997 article. “(I said), ‘But I’m not going to have a problem with you over something like this, Rob. If it’s what you are, it’s what you are.’” John also made a commitment to become involved with the support group, Parents & Friends of Gays & Lesbians, or P-FLAG.

Still, Leslie held Robbie at night as he cried himself to sleep. She told him everything would be all right, and he would someday find someone special to love and with whom he could raise kids. But he grew even more despondent about his sexuality. Robbie confided in another Camp Christopher buddy, 14-year-old Rebecca Lange, for whom he made a necklace in an arts-and-crafts class. She picked up on the sadness he concealed with a broad, infectious smile. “He could not live knowing that he was gay in a homophobic society,” Lange recalled. “It was unacceptable and impossible for Robbie to live his life lying to everyone. But he did not feel that it was even thinkable to tell anyone his secret.”

Robbie’s freshmen year at the Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland proved even more tumultuous. Attending on a full scholarship, he hoped he could simply blend into the crowd of the all-male student body. But boys started to mock him with names like “faggot” and “queer.” “Over a period of time, the effects of homophobia he encountered at school left him feeling ashamed, isolated and insecure,” Leslie said. “He was not happy to be gay, knowing how much his Catholic schoolmates, society and the Catholic doctrine rejected homosexuality.”

A crush on one of the school’s star football jocks only heightened Robbie’s emotional tug-of-war. He hid his infatuation from all but two classmates. And he confided in Claudia, who was a senior at Magnificat High School in Rocky River by this time. He told her that “it’s hard to be gay at St. Ignatius,” she recalled.

At the end of the 1996 high-school football season in November, Robbie rummaged through his mother’s personal papers for her checking account and driver’s license numbers so he could sign up as a member of the Prodigy computer service without her knowledge. A few days before Christmas, she discovered the truth. On December 30, she and Robbie’s therapist convinced the boy to attend his first meeting of Presence and Respect for Youth in Sexual Minority, or PRYSM, at the LGBT Center. The doctor also advised Leslie to treat her son like a naughty toddler and padlock the family’s computer room so he couldn’t gain access to the Internet.

Robbie was also seeing a gay psychiatrist, who could serve as a role model for the troubled boy. He also wrote a prescription for the anti-depressant Zoloft to help stabilize the fragility of Robbie’s sadness. The drug’s effects would take about a month to kick in, he advised. But it was too late. The boy who liked to read books and write poetry was composing the last chapter of his life that ended at the dawn of 1997.

Robbie and his older sisters, who were all nearing the end of a holiday break from school, were spending an unseasonably balmy New Year’s Day at their father’s century-old home on Maile Avenue in Lakewood with plans to sleep there overnight. Early the next morning on Thursday, January 2, Claudia dashed off to gymnastics practice at Magnificat. Danielle, meantime, caught a few extra zzz’s in a second-floor bedroom before her mother arrived later in the day to take the children on a downtown shopping spree at Tower City Center. Before she left the house, Claudia shouted a quick good-bye to a half-asleep Robbie.

At 10:30 a.m., John, whose bedroom was located in a finished basement, showered in an adjacent bathroom. At the same time, Robbie tiptoed into his dad’s bedroom, rifled through drawers and found a key to a gun cabinet. He opened the door, grabbed a pistol and a handful of bullets, locked the cabinet and returned the key to its hiding place.

Sometime during the next hour, armed with the loaded gun, Robbie sneaked through Claudia’s bedroom to a set of steps that led to an attic whose thick insulation made it virtually soundproof. A bullet to the head seemed an easier option to escape his anguish than to face the bullies at school or, worse yet, the fight for acceptance in a predominantly heterosexual world. He pulled the trigger; the suffering stopped. He would have gone to his first PRYSM meeting just two days later. “I regret that I prohibited Robbie from the one place (the Internet) that he did not have to be closeted, where people accepted him for who he was and shared his pain and struggle,” Leslie said. “The thought that he might have died without us ever having the chance to reassure him of our love, support and acceptance of his homosexuality would have been even harder for me to live with.”

Leslie didn’t find out the horrifying news until a couple of hours later. After she and Alexandria drove from Strongsville to pick up her other children for the shopping trip, her car broke down in the parking lot of a Lakewood gas station. She called John to meet her while she waited for a AAA truck to tow away her car. When he pulled into the lot, with a cop car behind him, an ashen-faced John told her that a horrified Danielle had found Robbie’s lifeless body on a mattress in the attic, with parts of his brain splattered on the floor and walls. Cuyahoga County Coroner Elizabeth Balraj determined the time of death at 4:32 p.m., the same time when his body was wheeled into her office.

On January 5, the day of Robbie’s wake, Leslie met several gay men who had befriended Robbie in Internet chat rooms and on websites. They told her he was a funny and entertaining teenager with a flair for creative writing beyond his young years. “(Robbie) shared how unhappy he was to be gay and difficulties he faced as a closeted gay youth at school,” Leslie said. “It is truly amazing that people online accepted him and tried to help him. Even though we didn't know about Robbie's deep pain at the time, at least he found acceptance and support online.”

St. Ignatius’ pastor, the Reverend James Lewis, also approached Leslie to offer his condolences. She told him that “other Robbies” were enrolled at the school, where teachers needed to reassure them that straight students should be kind to classmates with different sexual orientations. For those kids who already treated gays with respect, she said they should be applauded “for doing God’s work.”

Leslie then walked up to the Reverend F. Christopher Esmurdoc, an associate pastor of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Strongsville, where the Sadasivans regularly attended Sunday mass. She asked him to allot time during his eulogy to tell mourners to accept the LGBT community. He ignored her request. (In scandalous irony, Esmurdoc left the priesthood several months later, after he admitted to a gay affair with an older pastor from Borromeo Seminary in Wickliffe. He later was hired as a social worker at the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.) “I was hurt and in shock,” Leslie said. “There were students from St. Ignatius, Magnificat, all these schools to hear the message. He had this wonderful opportunity, and he could have said so much more.”

Leslie eventually offered to speak in front of the student body at St. Ignatius about her son’s distress before his death. Principal Richard Clark politely declined, saying he’d rather organize a mass that prayed for suicide victims. Though disappointed, Leslie said she didn’t feel bitter about the school’s rejection of her proposition. “I’m not a public person, but I would read on a loudspeaker, if it would help one boy out there,” she told The Chronicle after Robbie’s funeral. “Me and his sisters and his father and his other father all feel that there are all these other Robbies in the world. Not just the Robbies, but the people that treat the Robbies badly. If we can help them in any way, then we feel called by God to do it. I’m not an articulate person; I‘m just a mom who loved her son.”

Nearly nine months after Robbie’s burial, Leslie stood on the shores of Lake Marian with a Ziploc bag containing two sets of her son’s hair locks in her hands. One set -- the finer, lighter hair -- was clipped off his head when he was born. The undertaker had cut the coarser, darker second bundle of hair at the funeral home. Being a devout Catholic, she couldn’t bring herself to carry out Robbie’s wishes in his suicide note to be cremated and his ashes scattered at the summer camp he treasured. Tossing his hair into the lake seemed like a better alternative. She also created the website, Robbiekirkland.com, to tell Internet surfers about his story. “I am sure that Robbie is touched that his story is on the medium which he so loved,” she said. “Now, others like him might read it and see hope, knowing that they are not alone in their struggle and try to get help instead of giving up on life like Robbie did.”

Support and social groups for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered teens have cropped up throughout Northeast Ohio since Robbie’s suicide. One of the most active, Metro Youth Outreach for 14 to 24 years olds, offers a meeting place in the lower level of the LGBT Center at 6600 Detroit Ave., where teens and young adults can network with each other. Its staff members answer questions on a 24-hour help line. They conduct cooking, poetry and art classes. They even travel to hospitals in the program’s mobile clinic to administer testing for AIDS and the HIV virus and to hand out food, clothing and hygiene kits.

Through April of 2007, when she gave a speech at the Beaumont School for Girls in Cleveland Heights, Leslie lectured on LGBT issues to gay-straight student alliances on college and high-school campuses. She marched and spoke at gay-pride rallies in Cleveland, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. She became an active member of both P-FLAG and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN. She agreed to tell her son’s story in several published articles in "Ladies’ Home Journal," the "Plain Dealer" and gay-oriented newspapers in Miami and Philadelphia. And after eight years of rebuffing her, St. Ignatius’ administrators finally allowed her to speak at a “Day of Silence” student assembly in 2005. “Two of Robbie’s best friends who had graduated from Ignatius also spoke about him and homophobia,” Leslie remembered. “I felt Robbie’s presence. It was very surreal and bittersweet.”

Other family members also helped to raise awareness in Robbie’s memory. Claudia eventually earned a master’s degree in social work, became a child therapist because of her brother’s tribulations, and volunteered at a suicide hotline in Seattle. But Leslie curtailed her campaign for LGBT rights after the Beaumont lecture because of Alexandria. “My activism became embarrassing for her, and she was in the closet about (it) and having a gay brother who killed himself -- a double, social stigma for an adolescent girl,” Leslie said. “The homophobia at her Catholic grade school -- the same grade school that Robbie attended -- and Catholic high school forced her to go into the closet.”

In the midst of her hiatus as an activist, Leslie applauded from the sidelines as the gay community became more visible in mainstream society. Voters in Cleveland, Cleveland Heights and Lakewood elected gay candidates to public offices. Cleveland City Council overwhelmingly adopted a registry for gay domestic partnerships. A delegation of sports freaks successfully wooed the organizers of the worldwide Gay Games to stage the quadrennial athletic extravaganza in Cleveland in 2014. “I think Robbie would be thrilled by the progress that has been made,” Leslie said. “All of this is positive and a big improvement from (the time of his death). However, he would be disappointed that there is still so much homophobia in schools and in the world. There is still much to be done.”

Leslie continues to maintain the website that’s devoted to her son, sharing her experiences with online surfers. She’s made Robbie’s poetry available to readers. She’s rerun many of the newspaper articles that chronicled the aftermath of his suicide. And she’s provided links to resources that could further educate gay children and their families. “Through the years, many teens and adults have told me what a difference Robbie’s story made to their lives,” she said. “Robbie was my angel, and God helped me to do the impossible: To tell his story and to help others just like him.”

-----

Robbie Kirkland was buried in Section E, Lot 114, Grave D of Strongsville Cemetery on Pearl Road (State Route 42) three quarters of a mile north of Royalton Road (State Route 82) in Strongsville. He was 14 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser

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2010-06-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

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Last Will and Testament, Cuyahoga County Probate Court, Cleveland, Ohio, April 29, 1988.
“McFaul Fights Bar Transfer,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, November 24, 1970.
“Moser’s to Put On Best Bib and Tucker,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, January 6, 1957.
“Night Club on Clifton Put on ‘Good Behavior,’” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, June 18, 1942.
“Old Rendezvous of Stagehand to be Reopened,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, July 20, 1942.
Transcript of oral history session of the Northeast Ohio Lesbian/Gay Archives, Cleveland, Ohio, July 30, 1991.

Winsor French:

August, Bob, “Stop Laughing at Cleveland,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, September 18, 1979.
Brozan, Nadine, “Chronicle,” New York Times, New York City, New York, July 10, 1995.
Collier, Joe, “Cole Porter Tales Told by Winsor,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, October 17, 1964.
“Columnist’s Bride Will Inherit $675,279 on 21st Birthday in February,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 1, 1933.
Condon, George E., “The Rolls That Crossed the Sea,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, March 25, 1980.
French, Winsor, “Leaves Calm Villages for Hectic New York,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, September 27, 1952.
French, Winsor, “The Melancholy Tale of Moser’s,” Parade, Cleveland, Ohio, June 11, 1931.
French, Winsor, “Winsor French Tours City’s ‘Little Hollywood,’” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, August 25, 1934.
“French-Frueauff Wedding Bill $18,851,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 20, 1933.
“Margaret Perry, Ex-Wife of Winsor French, Weds,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, June 22, 1948.
“New Cleveland Magazine,” Time, New York City, New York, June 15, 1931.
Percent, Charles, “Moody Dick Mone Is Keyboard Wizard,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, April 10, 1964.
“Retired Columnist Winsor French Dies,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, March 7, 1973.
“$7,480 Trousseau for Cleveland Bride,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 21, 1933.
“Singer Wins Mrs. French,” Cleveland News, Cleveland, Ohio, December 4, 1934.
“Weds Again,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, January 11, 1938.

Philip Johnson:

Homer H. Johnson Family Papers: 1856-1957, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.
Varnelis, Kazys, “We Cannot Not Know History,” Varnelis.net, November, 1994.
Transcript of broadcast interview on Newshour With Jim Lehrer, Public Broadcasting System, New York City, New York, July 9, 1996.
Welch, Frank D., Philip Johnson and Texas, University of Texas Press, 2000.

Stella Walsh:

Byrne, James, “Stella Walsh to End Race for Citizenship Dec. 12,” Cleveland News, Cleveland, Ohio, December 1, 1947.
“Ch. 3 Sues to Get Walsh Test Results,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, January 8, 1981.
Clowser, Jack, “Ageless Stella Walsh Is Still Quick on Her Feet,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, October 23, 1965.
“CMED Defends the Way It Handled Call for Aid After Shooting of Walsh,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 6, 1980.
Cobbledick, Gordon, “Plain Dealing,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, June 12, 1953.
“Coroner Believes Stella Walsh Was Female Despite Male Organs,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, February 12, 1981.
“Coroner Issues Final Report on Stella Walsh Autopsy,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, January 23, 1981.
“Coroner to Release Stella Walsh Data,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, January 10, 1981.
Coughlin, Daniel, “The Great Race: Stella Beats Our Fella,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, July 13, 1967.
Coughlin, Daniel, “Stella Walsh Home, Recalls Triumph,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, July 30, 1964.
Coyne, John P., “Track Star Stella Walsh Fatally Shot in Robbery,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 5, 1980.
“Dillard and Stella Win in Philadelphia Meet,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, January 25, 1947.
“A Fan of Stella’s,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 7, 1980.
“$5,000 Reward in Walsh Killing,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 10, 1980.
“Fleet Library Dedication to Honor Stella Walsh,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, October 7, 1981.
Griffiths, John, “Slain Star Stella Walsh Active in Sports Till End,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 6, 1980.
Guenther, Wally, “300 Bid Farewell to Stella Walsh,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 9, 1980.
Hughley, Emanuel Jr., “Stella Walsh Slaying Remains Unsolved,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 4, 1981.
Jones, Harry, “Stella Brings 50 More Trophies From Europe,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 3, 1946.
Kiener, John, “Council Okays Naming Center for Stella Walsh,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, November 18, 1981.
Lebovitz, Hal, “Times Were Hard for Stella Walsh,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 6, 1980.
Lewis, Franklin, “Stella ‘in Circulation’ in Sunnier California,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, October 18, 1955.
Liv, “Stella Walsh-Transgender Olympian,” Etransgender.com, January 23, 2007.
“Maple Hts. Man Questioned in Walsh Slaying,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, March 10, 1981.
Marino, Jim, “Witnesses Are Sought In Walsh Slaying,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 11, 1980.
“Maybe You Can Help Find the Killer of Stella Walsh,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 30, 1980.
McCormick, Douglas, “New Bill Would Seal Coroners’ Records,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, May 6, 1981.
McLaughlin, Dick, “Stella Walsh Lives On in Hearts of Friends,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 6, 1980.
Miller, W.C., “Mourners Crowd Church for Legendary Stella Walsh,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, December 10, 1980.
Miller, W.C., “Stella Walsh ‘Lived and Died’ a Female, County Coroner Says,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, February 12, 1981.
Nano, Stephanie, “Lead in Stella Walsh Killing?” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 5, 1980.
Price, Elizabeth, “Walsh’s Abnormality Is Rare Condition,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, February 12, 1981.
Sandoz, Joli, and Joby Winans, Whatever It Takes: Women on Women’s Sports, “Remembering Stella Walsh” by Grace Butcher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York City, New York, 1999.
Sauerbrei, Harold, “Clevelanders in Olympic Games,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, January 13, 1948.
“Slavic Village Association Starts Fund in Memory of Stella Walsh,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 7, 1980.
“Stella Is Queen of Pentathlon,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, July 15, 1951.
“Stella Is Ruled Out of Olympics,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, July 3, 1952.
“Stella Quits Track, Will Write Memoirs,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, August 15, 1949.
“Stella Urges New Training Methods,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, November 5, 1962.
“Stella Walsh, 40, Eyes Golf Career,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, August 5, 1951.
“Stella Walsh Gets More Fame,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, August 29, 1978.
“Stella Walsh, Noted Sports Figure, Weds in Nevada,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, August 16, 1956.
“Stella Walsh Slain; Olympic Track Star,” New York Times, New York City, New York, December 6, 1980.
“Stella Walsh Wins National 200 Meters,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, June 29, 1947.
Wallechinsky, David, The Complete Book of the Olympics, Penguin Books, New York City, New York, 1984.
“Walsh Case Spurs Bill for Lid on Autopsy Data,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, May 12, 1981.
“Walsh Friends Plan to Sue Channel 3,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 16, 1980.
“Walsh Slaying Suspect Is Freed,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, March 11, 1981.
“You Couldn’t Met a Better Person,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, December 5, 1980.

Ross Hunter:

Amory, Cleveland, “Ross Hunter Returns to First Love-Teaching,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, November 7, 1976.
Barrett, Bill, “Ross Hunter Meets His Old Friend, Bob Barrett,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, July 9, 1976.
Batdorff, Emerson, “Hunter Goes to Columbia After Career at Universal, “ Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, April 6, 1971.
Batdorff, Emerson, “They Decry-and See-Sex Films,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, January 27, 1970.
Bellamy, Peter, “Trials and Toils of Ross Hunter,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, February 26, 1981.
Bradford, Barbara Taylor, “Movieland Showplace Has Ross Hunter’s Favorite Things,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, March 20, 1971.
“Burned Badly on First TV Film, Hunter Tries Again,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, July 2, 1976.
Eyman, Scott, “Ross hunter: Mr. Fuss Goes to Hollywood,” Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, Cleveland, Ohio, November 20, 1977.
Hickey, William, “Hunter Wants to Shoot Movie Here,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, June 30, 1978.
Hickey, William, “Moneychangers to Be Hunter-La,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, November 24, 1976.
Kleiner, Dick, “Hunter Bags his Quarry,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, March 10, 1979.
Kleiner, Dick, “Ross Hunter Found His Shangri-La,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, June 30, 1972.
“Lost Horizon,” Coolcinematrash.com., November 5, 2005.
Mastroianni, Tony, “Ross Is a Hunter for New Audiences,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, October 23, 1970.
“The Producer: The Old Way Is Still Valid,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, October 23, 1970.
Scott, Vernon, “Hunter’s Trials: The Best Place to Be Is Not TV,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, May 24, 1979.
Scott, Vernon, “Ross Hunter Tells of Film’s Success,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, September 15, 1970.
Shipman, David, “Obituary: Ross Hunter,” The Independent, London, England, March 13, 1996.
Thomas, Bob, Astaire: The Man, the Dancer, St. Martin’s Press, New York City, New York, 1984.
Wolf, William, “Hunter Says public Wants Films With Love and Hope,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, April 18, 1973.

Doris Palmer:

The Girardot (yearbook), Cape Central High School, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 1955.
“Palmer” (obituary), Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, May 6, 2007.

Mary Ann Finegan:

Byland, Kathleen, “Friends Called Victim of Flats Murder Compassionate; Death Hard to Grasp,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, June 7, 1982.
“Coventry Teacher Mary Ann Finegan’s Murder Solved,” The Suburbanite, Akron, Ohio. February 12, 2010.
“Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office Solves Cold Case After 28 years,” The Leader, Cleveland, Ohio, February 10, 2010.
The Eromnek, Kenmore High School, 1957.
“Grim Reaper,” The Daily Courier, Connellsville, Pennsylvania, March 28, 1947, and December 2, 1949.
Harris, Patti, “After 28 Years, Mary Ann Finegan Case Is Solved,” Gay People’s Chronicle, Cleveland, Ohio, February 26, 2010.
Hasch, Michael, “Pittsburgh Man Charged in 1982 Killing,” The Tribune-Review, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, February 11, 2010.
“Help Us Zap WMJI!” (flier), Queer Nation, Cleveland, Ohio, undated.
“Improve Cleveland’s Air Quality: Turn Off WMJI (flier),” Maryann Finegan Project, Lesbian/Gay Community Service Center of Greater Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, undated.
Kleinerman, Ellen Jan, “DNA Leads to Charges in 1982 Rape, Killing,” Plain Dealer, February 11, 2010.
“Maryann Finegan Project Gains Momentum,” Out & About, Lesbian/Gay Community Service Center of Greater Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, June, 1991.
“Pat Finegan Does on Way to Hospital,” The Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, November 23, 1949.
“Police Hunt Flats Slaying, Rape Suspect,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, June 7, 1982.
Sheeran, Thomas, “Prosecutor: 1982 Cleveland Slaying and Rape Solved,” Associated Press, February 10, 2010.
“Strike the First Blow“ (flier), Maryann Finegan Project, Lesbian/Gay Community Service Center of Greater Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, undated.
Trexler, Phil, “DNA Links Inmate to Coventry Teacher’s Slaying in 1982,” The Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, February 12, 2010.

David Batz:

Ellington High School Yearbook, Ellington, Connecticut, 1962.
Sackerlotzky, Rotraud, Robert Jursinski, Ann Caywood Brown and Christine Fowler Shearer, David Batz: An Impassioned Journey, Cleveland Artists Foundation, July 15, 2000.
Sheldon, Stephanie, “David Batz, Ceramic Artists, Ran Gallery,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, June 25, 1994.
Yannapoulos, Charles, “More Is Less,” Cleveland Scene, Cleveland, Ohio, June, 2000.

Hank Berger:

Baranick, Alana, “Hank Berger, 55 Ran Gay Disco, Bought the First ‘Hollywood’ Sign,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, November 4, 2006.
“Cleveland Club Maven Berger Dead,” United Press International, November 4, 2006.
“Economy Makes Future Vague for Records Pools,” Disco Beat, May, 1980.
“Hollywood Sign Sections,” Screenused.com, 2001.
“Hollywood Sign Sold on eBay,” Associated Press, December 8, 2005.
King, Jennifer Carolyn, “Give Me an ‘H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D’,” Ruggedelegantliving.com, November 30, 2005.
Koris, Sally, “Just When He Needed a New Hustle, Disco Promoter Hank Berger Saw a Sign From on High,” People, July 28, 1980.
The Lakewood Cinema (yearbook), Lakewood High School, Lakewood, Ohio, 1967.
Meyer, Norma, “Grab Yourself a Piece of H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D,” San Diego Union- Tribune, March 6, 2005.
Moore, Mike, “Creative Artists Paint a Bright Sales Picture,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, February 28, 1972.
Nash, Jay Robert and Stanley Ralph Ross, The Motion Picture Guide: E-G: 1927-1983, Cinebooks, Chicago, Illinois, 1986.
“Original Hollywood Sign Go on the Block for 200,000 Dollars,” Agence France-Presse, November 29, 2005.
“Petrasek Is the One the Others Try to _______,” Disco Beat, January, 1980.
Schwartz, Bonnie, “Hollywood Off-the-Wall Hangings Are Mementos,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, August 1, 1980.
Seid, Jessica, “Buy a Piece of HOLLYWOOD,” Money.cnn.com, November 17, 2005.
“Unhappy Apple: Owner Charges Inspectors Unfairly Closed New Disco,” Cleveland Press, March 21, 1978.
Vaccarro, Michelle, “Own a Piece of Hollywood,” Thecelebritycafe.com, November 27, 2005.
Wapshott, “Hollywood Sign Goes Up for Sale,” Calgary Herald, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, November 27, 2005.
Weigel, Tom, “Ailing Clubs Find a Berger Chef,” Cleveland Press, Cleveland, Ohio, April 23, 1976.
Who’s Who in America 2003: 57th Edition, Volume 1, A-K, Marquis Who’s Who, New Providence, New Jersey.
Wood, Stuart, “Hollywood Sign Scam,” Scams.net, 2006.
Wright, Will, “The Unlikely Fate of an American Icon: A History of the HOLLYWOOD Sign,” Associatedcontent.com, February 15, 2007.

Aubrey Wertheim:

Aubrey Wertheim Papers: 1974-2002, Western Reserve Historical Society Library, Cleveland, Ohio.
Baranick, Alana, “Aubrey Wertheim, Activist; Millie Wertheim, Writer,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, January 14, 2003.
Dobson, Wanda, “Peggy Wertheim Is a Skilled Artisan, and Now She’s Dyeing to Make a Living,” Evening Sun, ____________, October 7, 1981.
Ewinger, James, “Nordonia Graduate Breaks Into TV,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, February 13, 1984.
Harris, Marne, “Wertheim, Women’s Coffeehouse Win Awards,” Gay People’s Chronicle, January, 1990.
Murphey, Fran, “Café Vet of 55 Years Will Call It a Career,” Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, March 25, 1990.
Obituary, Gay People’s Chronicle, Cleveland, Ohio, January 17, 2003.
Wertheim, Aubrey, “Pride in Reclaiming a Loving World,” Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, June 17, 1990.
Wertheim, Millie, “Inching On to Metrics,” publication unknown, September 28, 1975.

Robbie Kirkland:

Cudnik, Doreen, “Why Did Robbie Kirkland Have to Die?” Gay People’s Chronicle, Cleveland, Ohio, (date?)
Sadasivan, Leslie, “Remember Me: Mom’s Story,” Robbiekirkland.com, undated.
Sardo, Rebecca Lange, “Remember Me: Rebecca’s Story,” Robbiekirkland.com, undated.
Schleis, Paula and Kim Hone-McMahan, “Teen Turns to Suicide to End Nonstop Torment,” Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, January 4, 1998.