Murder in the Gilded Cage

I have just returned to New York and examined in the morgue of the New York Times all the stories written and cabled of the Murder in the Gilded Cage. It is now six months since the weird death of Mrs. Breese, and I have decided that it is to the public interest that I present an unbiased factual account of what actually occurred in her winter home. For it is high time that someone set at rest the malicious rumors that still buzz wherever her set gathers. It is certainly due three of the principal actors in the tragedy that the truth be known. Whatever their personal failings may be, they have done nothing to deserve the stigma attached to their names. I do not see eye to eye with Ben Smith on this matter, who is responsible for the hitherto impenetrable secrecy. Boris Sergeivitch Perutkin, that most fantastic of investigators, is now concerned with another and even more devious problem, and does not care.

Perhaps it would be best to set forth first my connection with the case. You may remember that Mrs. Breese, before her storied death, was the center of a divorce case that startled the country. There is no need here to rake the dead leaves of sensation. It was one of those cases that linger on to the profit of lawyers over a period of years and supply the tabloids with juicy drippings. When it was all over, Mrs. Breese won. Her husband, in disgusted settlement, gave her the Havana home, the yacht, Mary Rose, named for their daughter, a coöperative Park Avenue apartment, and a competence that came to some fifty thousand dollars a year. Mrs. Breese’s lawyers fared even better. I might mention that Mrs. Breese was independently wealthy in addition, although her legal representatives went to some pains to conceal the fact. In any case, the scandal drove her out of the enigmatic pages of the Social Register and made her for the time being one of the best known women in America.

You will remember, too, that the name of Guy Thomas was coupled with hers all during the tortuous trials and appeals. Mr. Breese named him as co-respondent, although all efforts to prove the accusation were unsuccessful. Mutual friends of the Breeses divided on this issue. Gordon Rice, for example, in characteristic hearty fashion, refused to believe a word of it and severed a relationship of thirty years’ standing with the husband. Mr. Rice said Guy Thomas was a pleasant young man and an excellent dancer, which Mr. Breese was not, and he’d be hanged if he’d stand by and see an innocent woman spattered with scandal because of an entirely harmless friendship with a personable young actor.

When I set forth as a reporter for the News Association to cover the trial, I flattered myself on a professional lack of opinion in the matter. I did not know then that I would be thrown bodily into the maze of Mrs. Breese’s post-divorce life; and her perplexing death. Why I ever entered the service of Mrs. Breese I do not know. Ben Smith thinks it was sheer laziness and the inability to refuse. Perhaps it was because the woman fascinated me as a creature of incredibility. Yet she was real enough. But let me tell the story from the beginning. You shall judge for yourself.

With the aid of a newspaper clipping, I establish April 17, 1928 as the date of my first meeting with Mrs. Breese. I had come up from Richmond several weeks before, and finally found a berth with a local news agency. The case was totally unfamiliar to me when I set out to interview Mrs. Breese a day before her trial was scheduled to begin.

It was a glorious afternoon, a rare April day, and even the ornate lobby of the Park Avenue apartment house permitted an occasional beam of sun to enter. After preliminary negotiations with the doorman, the telephone operator, and the elevator guards, I was permitted to ascend to the fourteenth story, where a butler conducted me from the reception-hall to the high-ceilinged drawing-room. There were five enormous windows, and every shade was drawn, so that you had the impression of sitting in one of those softly-carpeted motion picture palaces. Later I was to discover that Mrs. Breese flowered only in dim rooms, with shades and curtains drawn, and her idea of human habitation was in harmony with that of the designers of the motion picture temples. She carried this atmosphere wherever she went, as people will.

She made a dramatic entrance into the room after keeping me waiting fully fifteen minutes, and I could hear her voice behind the grilled door, a peculiarly harsh voice that trilled, curiously enough, and chattered.

“_SO_ sorry to keep you waiting,” the voice said before I saw her, and then a tall and full-bosomed figure in jade green swept before me. Even in the faint light I could see she was a blonde, with somewhat faded blue eyes. It took no discerning observer to note that the masseur and the hairdresser had preceded me, and that the ladies’ maid had done her daily stint. The air filled not unpleasantly with a rare perfume, and then, with a gracious gesture to me, the lady seated herself, poised for the ordeal.

But if I expected a reticent, an embarrassment quite natural under the circumstances, I was quickly disillusioned. Despite newspaper training, I was bred in the school that regards one’s private life as unfit for public discussion. I expected to sympathize with her on the unfortunate circumstances that compelled me to intrude. But she made that quite unnecessary, in the harsh trilling voice that I shall never forget.

“My husband,” she said, “has a Napoleonic complex. He thinks he can dominate me.” She paused. “He can’t.” I readily believed that, although I had never met Mr. Breese. I might explain that Mrs. Breese had but recently discovered psychoanalysts, and the jargon of their trade was always on the tip of her tongue.

She then plunged into a detailed résumé of her grievances, which were many. She spoke with a cold vindictiveness that was repellent, and yet with a certain relish. I was to discover soon that Mrs. Breese, instead of shrinking from the publicity of the scandal, gloried in it. Who can forget the first day of her trial when the decrepit State Court Building was mobbed by the curious? For that event she had seated herself beside her chauffeur in the baby-blue limousine. She wore a bright plaid skirt, a Russian blouse, and about her head she had bound a bright bandanna handkerchief. “It is the gypsy in me,” she confided later. But if you were to dismiss her as a silly woman, you must ignore the occasional gleam of intelligence that shone from the fog of her chatter. And the occasionally generous impulses that made you think of her as a fine and noble-minded woman who had somehow let her life literally fall to pieces.

Mrs. Breese on the witness stand was meat and drink for the newspapers. She thought in headlines, and just about the time you had decided she was exhausted as a subject, she dragged out something else to feed the flames. Poor Mr. Breese hid from the reporters and smashed photographers’ cameras, and although he had been guilty of only a meaningless affair with a Follies beauty of uncertain reputation, lost the case with a resounding thud. And got himself thrown out of clubs, and snubbed by righteous individuals who knew the value of discretion.

Guy Thomas took the stand and absolved Mrs. Breese and himself from all wrong-doing. He was thirty-two then, dark, with that sleek look of a man who gives a good deal of attention to his clothes and his barber. He was singularly handsome, and had once been a model for commercial photographers. That was when he could not find work as an actor. Which was frequently. He was not a good actor. He had met Mrs. Breese at one of those Bohemian parties where social distinctions are wiped out for the evening, and she had taken what I believed at the time to have been a casual interest in him.

He did dance very well. He had a classic regularity of feature, and an excellent chin, and was one of the weakest men I ever met. I cannot explain his actions otherwise. As a type you associate him with Fifth Avenue tailors and Park Avenue restaurants, cheap cigarettes in gold cases, and an extremely limited knowledge of anything transpiring beyond his own immediate world.

Readily enough he admitted that occasionally Mrs. Breese had been good enough to entertain him in certain restaurants in return for his services as cavalier and dancing partner.

“I didn’t have the money to take her to such places,” he explained with a frank smile and a gleam of white teeth. “We discussed that, and rather than lose the pleasure of taking her out, I agreed she could pay the bills.”

There was a titter and some giggles in the courtroom, at which the young man flushed.

“I couldn’t take her to the type of restaurants I am forced to dine in occasionally,” he added in justification.

On the whole, his testimony did her no harm. If he did not cut a swagger figure, it was the opinion of jury and spectators that entertaining Mrs. Breese was Mr. Breese’s task, and in this the husband had obviously been negligent.

The two Breese children, Henry Jr. and the Countess Giering-Trelovitch, testified for their mother. Henry Jr. was twenty and the Countess twenty-five. Henry Jr. swallowed visibly as counsel wrenched from him incidents of bad temper and cruelty of which his father had been guilty. Mrs. Breese cried, rather effectively, while he was on the stand. His father covered his eyes with his hand.

Then the Countess, rather pale, rather bored, and yet curiously lovely, added the necessary confirmation. She seemed a slim edition of her mother, without her mother’s enormous energy.

But undoubtedly the star witness was Gordon Rice, wealthy promoter, traveler, and one-time soldier of fortune. Rice was fifty, a few years older than Breese Sr., white-haired, red-faced, and with a downright heartiness of manner that soon won the jury. His was obviously a painful duty, and you felt that the quicker it was over with the better he would like it. He told of the sordid affair of the Follies beauty; how he had warned the elder Breese that it would wreck his marriage. He told of certain episodes that the law demands, and nothing could shake his testimony in the cross-examination.

Then the trial was over, and the verdict was read with great solemnity. After which it was appealed, and appealed again. And then the elder Breese, who refused to take the stand, denied himself to all interviewers, sulked in his hotel suite and instructed the lawyers to settle. They did. And the newspapers, even the tabloids, dropped Mrs. Breese as quickly as they had picked her up.

I had been keeping in touch with her after the trial, for news agencies must continue reporting even the most trivial items long after the newspapers have sent their reporters to greener fields. It was because of this that I was able to observe how unhappy Mrs. Breese had become as interest in her problems waned. Where once the color of a new gown was well-nigh sufficient to warrant a re-make of an edition, her spiciest pronunciamentos now found the waste-basket. Her lawyers advised her to go to Europe and rest. But Mrs. Breese did not want to rest. The dramatic excitement of the trial had only whetted her appetite for the public eye.