ETERNAL TRIANGLE Pt Three

 

I can’t think of a single love triangle that turned out productively for the participants, from King David who did not let morality preventing him from separating Bathsheba from her Hittite husband, Uriah,....

...through King Arthur, who did let morality prevent him from separating his beloved Guinevere from her lusted after Lancelot.  And the “ménage-a-fools” between “Big” Jim Fisk, Josie Mansfield and Edward Stokes repeated the familiar sad story, with the standard final twist.

These self destructive convergences usually leave the participants exhausted and mumbling some absurd self justification, like “The heart wants what the heart wants”, when, in truth, the more apt description might be, “Stupid is as stupid does.” It needs to be noted that none of these disasters, which we all are suffer from, from time to time, could occur without the active participation of all members. The truth is the participants may be helpless, but they are never blameless.

“Big” Jim’s friends, who knew his love letters to Josie to be harmless drivel, urged him to publish them first, and thereby remove their threat. But this “Prince of the Erie Railroad”, this master of Wall Street, this robber baron supreme, refused to do so. Instead he bemoaned his fate, “By the Lord, this is my heart that you want me to make a show of, and I won't.” 

He was, however, willing to make a lesser show of it, slower and more deliciously painful, and far more dramatically detailed, by not paying the $200,000 demanded by Stokes (which "Big Jim" could easily afford) or by publishing the letters himself, which might even have turned a profit.  So, the curtain went up on the Third Act of this melodrama.

About one on the afternoon of Saturday,  6 January, 1872, “Big” James Fisk got the word that a grand jury had indicted Josie and Edward Stokes for attempting to blackmail him. He was in the offices of the Erie Railroad, on the second floor of his own Grand Opera House.  

At about 3:30 pm, a visiting friend, gambler John Chamberlain, was leaving the Opera House, when he saw a carriage crossing the intersection of 8th Avenue and 23rd Street.  As the carriage clipped past him, Chamberlain saw, peeking out from the passenger compartment, and staring bitterly up at the Erie Corporate offices, Edward Stokes.

Ten minutes later “Big” Jim Fisk was in his own carriage, heading uptown, to 44th and Amity Street, later to be renamed 3rd Avenue, to the Grand Central Hotel, around the corner from “Commodore” Vanderbilt’s brand new Grand Central Railroad Station (above).  

As he entered the hotel “Big” Jim recognized a porter by the name of John Redmond, and asked him to contact one of the guests, a daughter of Samuel B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph. The lady was living at the hotel, and had recently suffered a death in her family. Big Jim wanted to inquire as to her condition.  Redmond followed “Big” Jim up to the stairs toward the second floor lobby.

As they turned the corner at the base of the stairwell they were confronted by Edward Stokes, waiting at the top of the stairs (above) . Arm outstretched, he was pointing a handgun down the stairs - at them. “Big” Jim Fisk stopped, halfway up. Edward said firmly, “I’ve got you now,” and fired twice. Bang! Bang! 

Both shots hit Fisk, who cried out, “For God’s sake, will anybody save me?” The answer was "no".

Redmond, the porter, dove for cover.  Fisk staggered back to the foot of the stairs, where, out of the field of fire,  he collapsed.

Once they were sure the shooter had fled, Redmond and other employees carried Big Jim Fisk back up the stairs and into an empty room. He never left it.

A bellboy had followed Edward (above), and the shooter was arrested trying to leave the hotel a few minutes later. As the police were transporting Edward to jail, he asked if he could go into a bar for a drink. The answer was “no”. He later asked his jailer, “What do you think, is the man seriously injured?”

The man was. To one visitor, “Big” Jim explained he felt as if he had just eaten green apples. “I've got a belly-ache,”  he said. The gambler, John Chamberlain, did not believe it when he was told of the shooting. “I’ll lay $500 against $100 that it's false.” He would have lost that bet.

Josie, the self-centered center of this melodramatic triangle affair, had no such doubts. Shocked when a newspaperman told her of the shooting, she blurted out, “Edward must have been insane!” Then she immediately added, “I wish you to understand that I am in no way connected with this sad affair.” And finally she insisted, “I have only my reputation to maintain.”  Well, it was a little late for Josie's reputation. But she still had hopes. Josie always had hopes.

Big Jim Fisk held on long enough to identify his attacker when Edward Stokes was brought to his room. The identification was, of course, melodrama, The pair had been business partners for years, and had even shared the physical affections of Josie for a time. At best it seems to have proved neither the doctors nor the cops thought Big Jim was going to live to see any trial.  

And he didn't. Fisk died that very evening, at 10:54pm, surrounded by a chorus of women who had depended on the "Big Jim" for financial support.

They took his body back to his childhood home, in Brattleboro, Vermont, for burial.

The newspapers were endless in their praise of the man, as unrelenting as they had been, just days before, in their ridicule of him. His love letters, published a week after his death, were so banal, that they created barely a ripple.

As writer Edmund Stedman noted, “"Had Stokes been an illiterate laborer, he would have dangled in a noose two months later.” But Edmund's family was still wealthy enough that it took three trials to convict him of manslaughter. 

And even then he was sentenced to only six years in Sing Sing prison. He was a popular and entitled inmate, and served only four actual years. 

Once out he operated restaurants, and ended his life locked in lawsuits with the very people who had rescued him financially after prison. He died in 1901, at the age of 61.on 2 November, 1901.

For Josie Mansfield (above), the loss of “Big” Jim and Edward Stokes meant not just the loss of financial security, but, more importantly, the loss of drama in her life. Not that she didn't go looking for it. She testified at Edmund’s first trial, but was unavailable for the two that followed. She sued “Big” Jim’s widow, Lucy, for that $50,000 she still alleged "Big" Jim had invested for her, but that case was thrown out of court. 

She moved to Paris, where in 1891 she married a rich alcoholic, only to divorce him six years later. In 1897 she moved to Boston to live with a sister, then to Philadelphia to live with another sister. In 1899 she moved to Watertown, South Dakota to live with her brother. She died, back in Paris at the American Hospital, in 1931, having out lived her sugar daddy James, “Big” Jim Fisk, by a lifetime - 60 years. She even outlived the man she had overthrown a fortune for, Edmund Stokes – by 20 years.

At times the three had been a national laughingstock, a pubic delinquency and a media soap opera on a par with any modern day oversized love nest fest.  It  will not be long before another trio of thespians feels compelled to raise the curtain on another performance of the same play, and carry the character arcs to their illogical and inevitable dramatic conclusion, again. And again. And again. To quote Charley Harper, from "Two and a-Half Men"; Love is not blind. It's retarded."

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ETERNAL TRIANGLE Pt Two

  

I submit that Edward Stokes had a chance to break free from this  "triangle of stupid love".  Spending a weekend in the dreaded Tombs jail - precursor to the hell hole of Rikers Island -  was his wake up call.  And then unfortunately, for him, early in 1871, a judge threw out his arrest for embezzlement. Released from criminal restrictions on his behavior, Edward Stokes went full stupid.

The judge ruled the Greenpoint Refinery (above) was not a corporation but a partnership between Edward and “Big” Jim Fisk.  As a partner Edward could not steal money owed to the refinery, since he would have been stealing from himself.   And if Edward had just left it there, he might have stayed a winner. But being Edward, it was in his nature to carry things too far. That was one of the things that made Josie fall in love with him. Except Josies' other attraction to Edward was his money, and thanks to Big Jim cutting the profits from the refinery, Edward was now broke.

So Edward sued “Big” Jim  (above) for slander, asking again for that $200,000. “Big” Jim counter sued, demanding that his love letters be returned. 

Why Josie (above) had given the letters to Edward passes beyond common sense. In any case,  Edward's lawyers argued that the letters might provide evidence of Erie railroad stock fraud, and might be needed in some future criminal trial, and so should not be released. 

In truth, the only crime the letters were proof of was blackmail, which Edward and Josie were attempting to commit against Jim Fisk. And now, Big Jim's lawyers argued,  they were using the courts to carry out this crime.  So a judge ordered the letters be read by an arbiter, to determine just what they proved, if anything. 

The arbiter came to the conclusion that the love letters were maudlin, melodramatic, meretricious and – surprisingly – mundane, and contained no evidence of stock fraud. Given that the letters had only prurient value, the judge issued a restraining order preventing anyone, including the newspapers, from publishing them as long as the various slander cases continued. And with that their value as blackmail material against “Big” Jim, evaporated. After all, as James Gordon Bennet, Jr., publisher of the New York Herald, used to say, “The purpose of a newspaper is not to instruct but to startle.” 

It was at about this point that Edward’s wife took their daughter and fled to Paris. And "Big" Jim's wife, and her female lover, living in far off Boston, did the same. Clearly the married women in this case were smarter than their husbands, because they thus escaped being tainted with what that blue-nosed blue-blooded lawyer George Templeton Strong described as this “special stinkpot”.  

All of New York was snickering about the tri-cornered stench.  The newspapers kept fanning the stink, even without the letters, and day after day they mocked the participants’ peccadilloes. Now, “Big” Jim had long ago chosen to ignore the opinions of others, and Josie never had even the pretense of valuing virtue or reputation. 

So the only member of the triumphant with any sense of public pride left, and with a super abundance of that, and thus the only individual wounded by the continued public mocking, was Edward  Stokes (above). And he had been the one who had pushed the letters into court.

Having lost the letters as a weapon, Edward was forced to settle his lawsuit.  “Big Jim" allowed him to keep the $27,500 he had filched from the refinery,  plus $10,000 compensation for the weekend he had spent in jail, and $5,000 for his legal fees. Edward exchanged all of that for his half of the refinery. 

Edward was now freed from his immediate financial difficulty. Of course he was also now $38,000 in debt to five different attorneys, for all his lawsuits against “Big:” Jim Fisk (above).  And Edward had yet to win a single one. So he urged Josie to push ahead with her lawsuit against “Big” Jim.  Not that he could have stopped her.

In her lawsuit Josie was claiming that during their multi-year affair, James Fisk had invested $25,000 for her, and now she wanted it back. With interest.  “Big” Jim’s lawyers argued that the money had never been hers, just a wooing point, and that Josie’s entire life had been one scam after another.  On the witness stand Jose began with another lie. “I will be twenty-four years of age on the 11th of December next.” She was actually 28. 

It was perfectly predictable that under cross examination, Josie's sordid past would be used to impeach her. She was asked if, in California “a pistol was pointed in your presence at a man's head?” Reluctantly Josie replied, “There was a circumstance of that kind happened.” “Was it a man by the name of D. W. Perley…Was (the gun) pointed at him by (Josie's stepfather)? (And) did (Perley) sign a check before he went out?” All of this, Josie was forced to admit, was the truth. The jury, and the press, knew a badger game when they heard one described to them.

During over three hours on the stand,  Josie was also forced to admit that Fisk had bought her the house on 23rd Street, from the knocker on Josie's front door to the curtains in the parlor and the commode in the bedroom. She was even forced to admit that she had handed over her love letters from Fisk because Edward thought they “would benefit him in the case…pending between him and Mr. Fisk.”  All of this was predictable, as her lawyer must have predicted. But Josie had insisted on proceeding. Thus she was three times stupid; she was in love, she was in love with Edward, and she was greedy. 

And then, on 6 January, 1872, Edward took the stand in Josie’s case. Even under friendly direct examination, the spectators could not suppress a giggle when Edward insisted he and Josie were “just friends”.  When court broke for lunch at 1:00 p.m. Edward stormed out, infuriated. He was willing to be thought a liar, and a cad. But he was deeply offended at being laughed at. 

He lunched at Delmonico’s on the corner of South Hill  and 14th Street, and it was there that he learned from "a friend" that he and Josie had just been indicted for blackmailing “Big” Jim Fisk. It was the last straw.

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ETERNAL TRIANGLE Part One

I still wonder why they call it “news”? It is never “new”. As proof I give you the obtuse triangle of “Big” Jim Fisk, Helen Josie Mansfield and Edward Stokes (above); a triangle which would have bemused Sigmund Freud.

Jim Fisk (above)  was born in Vermont on April Fools’ Day in 1835. His father was a traveling “bummer”, selling pots and pans and trifles. When he was 15, "Big" Jim ran away to join " Van Amberg's  Mammoth Circus and Menagerie”, and returned three years later with a splash of color and bombast.  By the age of 36 Fisk had marketed his talents for lying and cheating into a fortune of $70 million - the modern equivalent of one billion, one hundred twenty-nine million, one hundred ninety-eight thousand dollars. 

In the midst of the Civil War, together with the most hated man in New York - his partner Jay Gould (above left) - Big” Jim (above, right) took over and then plundered the Erie Railroad.  

But it was “Big” Jim who decided to move the Erie’s corporate offices into the upper three floors of the Grand Opera House (above), which he also owned. 

For while his partner Jay Gould (above) had no interests outside of making money, Jim Fisk was a man of many prodigious appetites, most involving divas of one kind or another. Jim had been married to his dearest Lucy when he was just 19, but she resided in far off Boston with her own lady love, Fanny Harrod. 

And while Jim kept both ladies in luxury, and even visited them occasionally, he spent most of his free time with “actresses” in New York, and was a regular visitor at the business house of “the notorious Annie Wood”.  And it was in the dim red light of Annie's parlor that Jim was  introduced to his personal Helen of Troy, Helen Josephine Mansfield.

Josie, as she preferred  to be known,  was a beauty in an age when a sexy woman had some "meat on her bones". One admirer noted her “…full, dashing figure". He also noted "Her eyes are large, deep and bright…Her voice is very soft and sweet”.  

It was Josie’s mother who first recognized the girl’s talent as “an incorrigible flirt”, and used her as bait in a badger game played in Stockton, California. A pettifogging local attorney named D.W. Perley , while in a state of undress, was caught "courting" the young Josie.  To cover the scandal Perley wrote at least one check at gunpoint. There was some quarrel over the proceeds of this venture, and shortly thereafter Josie secretly married Frank Lawlor, an actor.  The newlyweds then abandoned her mother, in search of greener fields.

She followed Frank cross-country on the music hall circuit, arriving in New York City in 1864. Here, two years later, Frank came to the shocking discovery that Josie “was going astray” on him. Although why that should have shocked him, seems an open question.  In any case, they divorced, and Josie sought a career more suited to her talents, in the bordello of Annie Wood. There she enticed Annie to introduce her to the genial and jovial and generous Mr. Fisk. He was enchanted. She was enriched.

Over night Josie went from being behind in her rent to the “Cleopatra of West Twenty-third Street”, the owner of record of a four story brownstone (after some $65,000 worth of improvements) - conveniently located just around the corner from "Big" Jim's Opera House – with four servants, a wardrobe filled with dresses, and a jewelry case accented by real jewels.

But having achieved everything she had hungered for, Josie was now bored. And that was when she made the acquaintance of one of “Big” Jim’s business partners, Edward Stokes (above, center), and fell head over heels in love with him.

It was understandable. Where Jim Fisk had few social skills, Edward Stoke (above) had an excess. Where “Big” Jim was physically blunt and crude, Edward was handsome and dashing. He was a privileged, pompous and prideful dandy, with a trophy wife and a 9 year old daughter. 

Josie was experienced enough to recognize that Edward (above) was also a spendthrift and an inveterate gambler, regularly losing small fortunes on race horses. An affair would be dangerous for them both. Josie depended on Jim Fisk for her income. And, in fact, so did Edward. He was a partner with Jim in a Greenpoint, Brooklyn oil refinery.

Edward ran the place, and “Big” Jim’s Erie Railroad transported the refineries’ oil at a discount.  It would seem that because of a hunger for self delusion and self destruction in 1869 Edward and Josie began an affair -  they thought behind “Big” Jim’s back.

Such a triangle could be maintained only so long as all the parties carefully judged the angles. But algebra was a skill that none of the three possessed in quantity or quality. 

In January 1870 Josie Mansfield announced that she no longer wanted to see “Big” Jim unless he made her financially independent. She reminded him,  “You have told me very often that you held some twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars of mine in your keeping…a part of the amount would place me where I would never have to appeal to you for aught”  And now, she told "Big Jim, she wanted "her" money.

“Big” Jim was hurt. He responded, “Have I not furnished a satisfactory mansion? Have I not fulfilled every promise I have made?” And then he let it be clear that he was fully aware of her affair with Edward. “You may well imagine my surprise at your selection of the ‘element’ you have chosen to fill my place. I was shown today his diamonds, which had been sacrificed ... at one-half their value ….You will, therefore, excuse me if I decline your modest request for a still further disbursement of $25,000” Jim even began calling Josie his Little Miss “Lump-sum”.

Having received a definitive “no” from her sugar daddy,  Josie began shifting her demands. First, she threatened to publish “Big” Jim’s love letters.  Then she said was willing to spend one more romantic evening with him. Then she hinted she would share secret details of his Erie Railroad stock manipulations with the press. 

Through an intermediary “Big” Jim asked Edward directly how much he would require to return those love letters and return Josie as well. Edward asked for $200,000, and that seemed to have hit “Big” Jim’s limit, again.

Of course,  "Big" Jim still sent Josie cash when she asked for it - $500 on 7 November,, $300 more three days later, then another $500 a week later. Now why did he do that? 

He must have known that most of the money was going to Edward's gambling debts.  Of course November was also the month that “Big” Jim cancelled the shipping discount for the refinery he shared with his partner.  Yes, “Big” Jim was hurting his own profit margin, but Edward was being squeezed much harder. And Big Jim could afford it. 

Edward grew so desperate that in January of 1871 he collected a $27,500 debt owed to the refinery, and pocketed it.  Which is just what  “Big” Jim had been waiting for.

Edward was charged with embezzlement and arrested. The Lothario spent a weekend in the notorious New York City jail "The Tombs" (above) before he could raise bail.  Edward swore his revenge for the insult.

Why “Big” Jim had not done this sooner remains a mystery. The man was a Wall Street cut throat, merciless and cruel to his business competitors and partners. Yet he seems to have been sheered of his strength in the face of Josie's demands. 

Josie  now sued "Big" Jim, demanding the pay her $50,000 (the $25,000 she insisted he owed her, plus interest). Edward joined in, suing “Big” Jim,  to force him to buy out Edward’s share of their refinery for $200,000.  And at last the entire mess was out in the open, where the press could profit by it.  And they always love that. This story, they knew,  was just beginning.

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