NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime Read online

  Kitty Flynn was undoubtedly part of the key to Worth’s change of heart and his sudden decision to keep the portrait. The former Irish barmaid and the late Duchess of Devonshire, whose piquant history was now enjoying a second lease on life after the theft, had many of the same character traits: an extraordinary zest for life, a healthy disrespect for the opinions of others, and thus a freedom of spirit that would always be denied the bitter and complex Worth. The physical resemblance between the two women was equally striking. The best portrait of Kitty shows her with a teasing, pouting expression which might have been borrowed directly from Georgiana. The Duchess’s golden tresses, flashing eyes, her curvaceous figure and vivid determination to enjoy herself, and others, were all echoed by Kitty in her prime, and the former hostess of the American Bar had long and rightly considered herself one of nature’s aristocrats.

  Like some criminal Pygmalion, Worth had sought to mold Kitty into a flawless replica of his ideal woman—elegant, pliant, and socially acceptable—and he had succeeded. Yet there was a part of Kitty he could not touch—her very vitality—and thus his creation had betrayed and abandoned him. Worth’s “Fair Lady,” as in every version of that enduring myth, had shown she did not need him. Galatea had taken flight. He had sought to control and hold Kitty, and for the first time in his life he had failed. Gainsborough’s Duchess, by contrast, was docile and maneuverable, a perfect painted captive in a way Kitty had declined to be. In the Greek myth, Pygmalion found love when his beautiful statue came to life; Worth perhaps found some remnant of love by transferring his affections from flesh, blood, and spirit to canvas, oil paint, and artifice.

  One writer who speculated on the motives of the man who stole the Gainsborough wondered if he might be “a fin de siècle scoundrel … a mad enthusiast [who] had stolen the portrait to worship its grace and tender beauty in the still watches of the night, when pale moonbeams lit up the rounded form and revealed fresh depths in those lustrous eyes. Folly and crime there might have been—let there also be love.” The writing was pure Victorian schmaltz, the effect somewhat emetic, but the suggestion was entirely apt.

  Half a lifetime later, Worth remarked that the portrait had been “a white elephant on his hands for years that he could not get rid of.” This claim was manifestly false. Over the next twenty years, he could have reopened negotiations with Agnew’s for the return of the portrait at any stage, but he did not.

  In time, the rumor that Worth was the thief gained currency in the underworld and many a dubious character offered to help arrange its return, for a consideration. He turned them all down, preferring to face disgrace, penury, and imprisonment rather than part with the Duchess. The painting became his permanent companion, as constant and demure as Kitty had proved fickle and independent. When he traveled, she came, too, in his false-bottomed trunk; in London he slept with her, literally, the Duchess pinned beneath his mattress.

  Still, there was more to this strange relationship between a master thief and his stolen Old Master. As Worth’s obsession grew, the painting came to exert a hold over him, a symbol and reflection of his own artificial existence. In Georgiana’s powerful image, he found a voyeur’s keyhole through which he could spy on the privileged society to which he aspired but of which he could never truly be a part, any more than Georgiana could return to life. She was a fetish, representing the pinnacle of his dreams and the evidence of his exclusion. The most desirable object a man of wealth could own, here was a prize he could never display—unlike his racehorses, yachts, and luxurious homes—an icon of his power and powerlessness. When Worth remarked that he could not “get rid of” the painting, he was betraying his own impotence. Like a murderer preserving body parts, he clung to this ultimate testament to his crimes, for the arrogant gaze of the Duchess crystallized all his strength and frailty. She was his captured enemy standard, tangible evidence of his hatred for and power to undermine respectable society, an object of overwhelming beauty to crown Worth’s ugly trade, a focus of longing and loathing. But when he looked on that lovely, scornful face, did he not see a pitiful reflection of his own con trick, a tawdry, superficial creation that was not even skin-deep? As the years rolled on and the painting slowly merged with his own conception of himself, Worth perhaps came to realize that his fabricated world was founded on the Duchess and her symbolism. “Feasting his eyes on the coveted object in secret,” in the words of a contemporary, he clung to the great painting as if his life depended on it, because it did.

  Worth’s relationship with his stolen Duchess altered and deepened over time—from affectionate pride and admiration to dependence and fixation—but we can trace its genesis with some precision. He had hit on the plan to steal the painting while brooding on Kitty’s departure from London, but it was in the summer of 1877, more than a year later, that he abruptly and permanently broke off all negotiations for its return—the exact moment when Kitty’s life took a new and, for Worth, a freshly devastating turn.

  Just as he seemed to be closing on a deal with Agnew’s, word reached Worth that his onetime lover, the “canker” in his breast and probably the mother of his children, had found a new suitor in New York and planned to marry him. This final rejection also pushed Worth into matrimony, but of a very different sort: his elopement with the Duchess was now transformed into a full-fledged marriage that would last a quarter of a century.

  FOURTEEN

  Kitty Flynn, Society Queen

  That delightfully salacious newspaper, the New York World, now sadly defunct, would later conclude with a sly wink that, while playing the role of hostess to a gang of villains at the American Bar in Paris, Kitty “perfected herself in the arts and graces that enabled her to make her second and most brilliant matrimonial coup.” She was only twenty-eight and exceptionally beautiful when, as the newspapers reported, she “captured a matrimonial prize which many of New York’s proudest society women would not have disdained.” With two children to support, and her ambition for fame and fortune burning as bright as ever, Kitty was plainly on the lookout for a new husband, so when Juan Pedro Terry sauntered elegantly into her life, she summoned up every art and grace in her portfolio. Juan Terry could hardly have been more ideal: he had handsome blue eyes, Irish blood, the beard of a sprightly conquistador, a taste for luxury, and a courtly demeanor. He was, moreover, staggeringly rich.

  Juan was the son of Thomas Terry, an Irish adventurer whose ancestors, like Kitty, had quit the damp sod of Ireland to make their fortune in the New World. Thomas, or Thomaso, Terry was born in the city of Caracas, Venezuela, on the 24th of February 1808, and “baptized in the local church of San Pablo.” An energetic and resourceful youth, he began building up a fortune by exchanging tracts of land for cheap jewelry, and in 1830 he settled in Cienfuegos, Cuba. There he met and fell in love with Teresa Dorticós y Gómez de Leys, the French-born daughter of a Havana sugar planter, and asked for her hand in marriage. Teresa’s enormously wealthy father, don Andrés Dorticós y Casson, the governor of Cienfuegos, took one look at the beguiling but hardly dependable figure of Tom Terry, and exploded. Not only did he refuse his consent, but he ordered his field hands to give his daughter’s impertinent suitor a sound thrashing and throw him off the premises. Terry promptly eloped with Teresa, and they were married on October 31, 1837. Thomaso simply ignored the ensuing uproar, and “when he heard that his father-in-law had referred contemptuously to him he remarked quietly and earnestly, ‘I shall be richer than he is some day.’ ”

  And so he became. “Every transaction in which the young Venezuelan was concerned proved immensely profitable. His sugar plantations gave an abundant yield. The lands for which he had exchanged trinkets became valuable plantations.” Remaining loyal to Spain during the Cuban insurrection, Terry was rewarded with vast parcels of confiscated land at low prices, which “proved veritable gold mines,” and within five years he was the largest sugar planter in Cienfuegos, richer by far than his now amiable father-in-law. Some of his fortune may have been made in a
n even more unromantic way, for according to one report he supplemented his income from sugar with a side business in the slave trade. Nonetheless, Thomas Terry exchanged his Venezuelan passport for American citizenship, and as “one of the wealthiest men in the Americas,” he and Teresa traveled the world, collecting properties and having children, amassing, by and by, roughly a dozen of each. “The Terrys owned houses in New York and a mansion in Paris on the Rue de la Boétie, in prime expatriate territory off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and dwelt also in several castles of the Loire Valley, including, for a while, the magnificent Château de Chenonceau.”

  Tom Terry was a prodigiously generous father to his multitude of children and handed out regular dollops of cash. Juan Pedro, the youngest, came to New York in 1875 with a gift from his father of $900,000 in cash, “with which he went into Wall street and when he was through with a certain transaction in gold he was half a million richer.” An adept speculator, Juan was “distinguished for his business ability, but fond of a life of luxury and pleasure.” Both aspects of his character immediately endeared him to Kitty Flynn.

  Kitty may well have kept from her suitor the less respectable details of her history, which only leaked out many years later, but if Juan knew that the object of his adoration was a onetime barmaid who had been married to a bigamous burglar and had, for many years, shared her affections with her husband’s friend and partner in crime, he does not seem to have cared one jot. His own family history was quite as romantic and roué as Kitty’s, and with millions in the bank, he knew society could titter all it wanted. Indeed, the widow Flynn’s racy past may have added to her fascination in the eyes of the wealthy, fun-loving flâneur and speculator. Juan was also a bland and vacillating man whose will, weak at the best of times, was no match for the Irishwoman’s gumption. Kitty had more than enough chutzpah for them both.

  According to Sophie Lyons, the two met at an art dealer’s on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, where Kitty, perennially short of money, had gone to sell the last of the paintings from the American Bar. “Young Terry was infatuated with Kate’s queenly beauty, and he laid siege to her heart so ardently” that she agreed immediately to marry him. Sophie’s romantic memory being what it was, it seems rather more likely that, as newspapers later reported, they met at the widow Flynn’s boarding house one evening when Juan, on the spur of the moment, invited his hostess to attend a charity ball with him. “She was pretty and fascinating, and caught the imagination of the Cuban,” the papers reported.

  The only hitch in their fast-blooming love affair was that Kitty was still legally married to Charley Bullard, who was also illegally married to someone else. The intervening years had not been happy ones for the musical felon. On September 13, 1878, he had managed to escape from the prison in Concord to which he had been consigned for his part in the Boylston Bank robbery. “His conduct as a prisoner was uniformly docile and good for many months, until one day he surprised his keepers by a seemingly inexplicable outbreak of insolence and riotous disturbance. For this offense against discipline he was confined overnight with five other rioters in the cells for refractory prisoners. The next morning it was discovered the birds had flown. Bullard had somehow fitted keys to the locks of the cells, released his confederates and found a way of escape.”

  At liberty in New York, and in a drunken euphoria, he had sent an “insulting postal card” to General Chamberlain, the prison warden at Concord jail, “stating that the Manhattan Bank robbery was planned by him.” After bumming around New York for a while, Bullard had made his way to Toronto, where he slipped back into some low-level crime, but “his ill-gotten gains soon melted in his hands.” Long imprisonment followed by heavy drinking had sapped his once-legendary abilities as a sneak thief and pianist. The man who once had “fingers so sensitive he could open a combination safe with his hands alone” now had the shakes so badly he could hardly open a bottle, let alone play the piano with any skill.

  The thief of the Merchant Express and the Boylston Bank was reduced to petty pilfering and finally came to grief “while penny weighting a watch chain in a jewelry shop,” for which he was arrested and sent to the Canadian Penitentiary at Kingston for five years. This time he found himself well and truly incarcerated, and it was here, in the winter of 1880, that Bullard finally received the news that Kitty had divorced him.

  The following spring, Kitty and Juan Terry were married by Judge Morgan in a civil service at Jefferson Market Court in New York, “greatly to the consternation of his family,” who had been making their own investigations into Kitty’s past. Of all the levels of hypocrisy in this tale, the fury of the Terrys when presented with an Irish barmaid as a relative is among the most impressive.

  To his credit, and like his father before him, Juan Terry simply ignored the bleating of his nouveau-riche relatives and moved his new wife into luxurious apartments in Stuyvesant House, New York. The widow Flynn may initially have been attracted by Terry’s wealth, but they were well suited to one another and the result was, as Sophie Lyons reports, an “exceedingly happy marriage.” Kitty’s two daughters, “who had grown up to be beautiful girls,” were informally adopted by their wealthy new stepfather. Juan Terry “permitted Kate’s daughters to use his name and saw that they were properly educated with private lessons in the arts and sojourns in schools in New York and on the Continent in keeping with their rich-gypsy existence.” New York society might snigger as word of Kitty’s lowly origins leaked out, but the extent of Terry’s fortune was sufficient to ensure that such carping was short-lived. Within a few years Mrs. Terry had become a noted figure in New York society and a sought-after guest at the city’s social functions.

  Her good looks, her wealth, and her exciting past earned Kitty the envy and attention of the masses, but another aspect of her character ensured that she quickly became a regular feature in the pages of the more scurrilous New York newspapers: her newfound and obsessive taste for litigation. The gangster’s moll who had happily turned a blind eye to the illegal doings of Worth and Bullard now recruited the law to her side. She sued hard and she sued often, and was sued in turn.

  Where Worth had, for obvious reasons, made every effort to avoid setting foot in court, Kitty was strangely drawn to the legal fray, perhaps out of a desire to show herself on the right side of the law, having spent so much of her early life, if not actively, then at least by association, on the wrong side. Kitty was no criminal; she was not even a natural dissembler. She was an actress, and the courts were her stage. While her legal imbroglios did not always show her in the best light, the attendant publicity and revelations added to her social cachet—a manner of social self-advancement not unknown in modern times.

  Her first experience in the New York courts involved one Miss Alcevinia, or “Vinnie,” Atwood, a young lady of dubious reputation, who appeared to be on uncommonly, not to say infuriatingly, intimate terms with Kitty’s new husband. The facts are disputed, as with all such domestic spats, but The New York Times reported the incident thus: “Returning from a shopping tour on the afternoon of Nov. 10, 1881, Mrs. Kate Louise Terry found in her room in the Stuyvesant House, a letter addressed to her husband, Mr. Juan P. Terry. As the address was in feminine handwriting she opened the letter, and found it contained a request for money to enable Miss Vinnie Atwood to make a trip to some place called Burlington where she desired to interview the father and mother of some man who had done her a wrong.” The New York World reported that Kitty had actually extracted the letter from her husband’s pocket, “the tone of which indicated a degree of intimacy not pleasing to his wife.”

  The redoubtable Kitty, who thought nothing of opening her husband’s letters and was no stranger herself to the intricacies of divided love, took to the warpath. “She wrote a reply, signing her husband’s name, took a cab and drove to the vicinity of Miss Atwood’s flat. She sent the missive into the house and receiving no reply, followed it in person.” Kitty testified that she had found Miss Atwood and some other women “
sitting smoking and drinking,” and that when she demanded an explanation for the letter, she was assaulted. Miss Atwood’s account was probably more accurate, given what we know of Kitty’s incendiary personality: “Mrs. Terry, as soon as she entered her rooms, began to curse her and throw miniature images &c at her.” A brief but ferocious bout of fisticuffs ensued, “in the course of which crockery was broken and Mrs. Terry’s face was bruised.”

  Kitty stormed off to the police station at the 29th precinct, and Miss Atwood was arrested on a charge of assault and battery, to which a further charge of grand larceny was added after Kitty claimed her rival had also stolen from her the sum of $1,000. Justice Smith was plainly baffled by the fracas, and to Kitty’s fury, the theft charge was dismissed. Miss Atwood was briefly held on the charge of assault, and when she was finally acquitted, she promptly filed a countersuit against Kitty, “complaining that Mrs. Terry had acted maliciously, and had injured her in her social reputation and standing, for which she asked $25,000 damages.”

  When the cat-fight came to court more than a year later, New York was agog. Kitty insisted that Miss Atwood was a slut, “a person of bad character, and therefore could not have been hurt in reputation,” since she had no social standing to damage. Miss Atwood’s lawyers, in turn, subjected Kitty to “a similar cross-examination, the design of which was to show that she must be an untruthful woman because she was formerly the wife of Charlie Bullard, alias ‘Piano Charlie,’ one of the Boylston Bank robbers, and therefore the associate of his friends. She was asked if she knew certain notorious criminals and she said she did not.”

  Kitty launched into an impassioned defense of her misspent youth. “Her marriage to Bullard, alias Wells, she said, occurred when she was only 17 years old. He represented himself as a millionaire, and she married him after having known him only three weeks.” The jury found in Miss Atwood’s favor, but, perhaps moved by Kitty’s account of life with a wicked bank robber, ordered her to pay just $800 in damages, a mere trifle, given the size of the Terry bank account, and a great deal less than the $25,000 demanded. What Juan Pedro made of the legal tangle between his new wife and a woman we can only assume was his mistress is not recorded, because the Cuban millionaire, showing eminent good sense, had gone on holiday. Kitty, however, seems to have regarded the verdict as a moral victory. “The court experience seemed to whet the appetite of the ex-barmaid for legal disputes,” the New York World later reported, “and ever since then she frequently figured in the New York courts.”