The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice De Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll Read online

  From birth, Juliabelle had been groomed to marry a wealthy and influential husband. Needless to say, when William Silverthorne began to pursue her, the Armours and Chapins were far from impressed. Despite William’s quite significant wealth and promising career as an entrepreneur, the Armours and Chapins considered him a highly inappropriate match for one of the most eligible heiresses in Chicago. Even though William could trace his ancestors back to their arrival in Virginia from England in 1656, the Silverthornes had become affluent through business endeavors, such as making felt and selling lumber, and were therefore deemed socially inferior. Furthermore, the Armours and Chapins wholeheartedly disapproved of William’s reputation as a drinker, gambler, and ladies’ man. Undeterred, William courted Juliabelle relentlessly, pursuing her with the same zest, determination, and enthusiasm that he usually reserved for his business deals. Eventually, his good looks, charm, and persistence won the day and he quite simply swept Juliabelle off her well-heeled feet. The undivided disapproval of her family notwithstanding, Juliabelle and William were married in Chicago on January 8, 1892. It was a modest affair by Armour and Chapin standards, with only close family in attendance. Shortly afterward, the couple left for Buffalo, where William and his brother Asa had recently purchased their own lumberyard.

  At the time, Buffalo was the eighth-largest city in the United States. By the early 1900s, it had a population of close to 400,000. Its proximity to Niagara Falls made it a popular tourist destination, and as a railway hub, it was an appealing and efficient center of commerce for the many entrepreneurs—William and Asa included—who flocked to the city in the 1890s in the hope of making their fortunes there. Juliabelle began setting up house, but William was doggedly determined to build up his business and was often away for long periods at a time, traveling across the country as far afield as Arkansas and Missouri in order to open new sawmills and set up plants. The seven years in which the couple failed to conceive a child were a period of enormous loneliness for Juliabelle, who found herself living far away from her home and family and with a husband who was frequently absent. Although the eventual birth of her daughter brought her a degree of fulfillment, it could not mend her fractured marriage.

  In the years after Alice’s birth, Juliabelle and William were unable to conceive another child, and although Juliabelle adored her only daughter, she continued to feel dissatisfied with her life in Buffalo. To make matters worse, her health was failing: She was weak and permanently tired. Meanwhile, William continued his regimen of working and heavy socializing. He was drinking, gambling, and spending more and more time in Chicago. There were rumors that he was having affairs, possibly even one with Juliabelle’s cousin Louise Mattocks (a member of the Chapin clan). By the early part of 1907, Juliabelle was beside herself with unhappiness. She was now convinced that her husband and cousin were having a relationship. Gathering up her courage, she confronted William. What followed was a vicious argument, which culminated in William’s locking her out of the house at night in the middle of the icy Buffalo winter. Juliabelle was not readmitted until the morning. Shortly afterward, she was diagnosed with vascular laryngitis. She died six months later, on June 2, 1907, at the age of only thirty-five. William had his wife embalmed with surprising speed, and she was buried two days later, on June 4, 1907.

  William now found himself living alone with a young and very unhappy daughter. Juliabelle’s death was a crushing blow to Alice, who was deeply attached to both parents but who had always spent so much time with her mother. To a seven-year-old girl who woke up one morning to find her mother gone, it was little compensation that Juliabelle had willed an enormous inheritance to her daughter, placed in trust until she reached the age of eighteen. The trustees of the will were Juliabelle’s father, her mother’s elder brother, Simeon B. Chapin (Uncle Sim), and her mother’s elder sister, Alice (Mrs. Francis May, known as Aunt Tattie). Meanwhile, in an effort to ease Alice’s confusion and moderate his feelings of guilt, William redoubled his efforts to spoil his only daughter completely. He fawned on Alice, taking her with him everywhere he went. After Juliabelle’s death, they traveled to Chicago together and on a whirlwind tour of Europe, with William continually showering his daughter with gifts and indulgences. A dangerous expectation was being established between father and daughter—one that would forever complicate Alice’s relationships with men in the future. Whenever she wanted something from William, she was immediately and elaborately appeased.

  There can be little doubt that William adored Alice, but it has to be said that he recovered from Juliabelle’s death with remarkable ease. Barely a year later, he remarried. As it turned out, Juliabelle had been correct in her suspicions that William and her cousin were having an affair. His bride was none other than her cousin, Louise Mattocks. The wedding ceremony took place at the American Church on the quai d’Orsay in Paris on July 8, 1908, with Alice and two witnesses in attendance. It is likely that William proposed to Louise before he left for Europe but that the engagement was kept secret in order to stifle the growing rumble of rumors back in Chicago. After the wedding, Alice accompanied her father and new stepmother on their lavish honeymoon around Europe. The Silverthornes traveled in the luxurious compartments of first-class train cars. They ate at the finest restaurants and stayed in the most well appointed of hotels. If William had set out to distract Alice from the death of her mother and to win over the heart of his new bride, this trip was certainly very successful, if fantastically costly.

  For her part, Alice was developing an early and extensive knowledge of the great European cities. Before she was twelve, she had visited London, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, and Rome. She was a precocious child, and it seems she appreciated both the sights and the culture on offer. Throughout her life, she would continue to travel, always feeling more at home when abroad. During the honeymoon, Alice charmed her stepmother, and the pair developed a genuine soft spot for each other. In this difficult period after her mother’s death, the relationship with Louise must have been a welcome and stabilizing one. But William’s latest conquest only served to redouble his problems with the Armours and Chapins. He had married into their ranks for a second time, an unforgivable outrage. The two families also believed, possibly with some justification, that William was an inadequate father. By parading Alice around the best hotels and restaurants in the world, they believed, he would damage her development and reputation. They were horrified by William’s excesses and feared he would ultimately diminish Alice’s chances of being accepted in society.

  William, of course, carried on after his own fashion. On returning from Europe with his daughter and new bride, he set about looking for a new home. William and Louise decided to leave provincial Buffalo for New York City, where William bought a house at 40 East 60th Street in Manhattan; he also purchased a weekend retreat in Sharon, Connecticut. Over the coming years, Louise had several children by William, only two of whom survived to adulthood, Bill, born in May 1912, and Patricia, born in July 1915. Despite these new arrivals, Alice remained her father’s particular favorite. At the age of twelve, she crossed the Atlantic in his company from New York to Cherbourg on the Aquitania, the magnificent Cunard liner. Alice liked to dress beyond her years, and William did not deter her. Even at twelve, she could pass for seventeen, and she relished wearing silk dresses and makeup. Everyone she met on the Aquitania treated her as an adult. Word reached the Armours and Chapins that William would deliberately fail to introduce Alice as his daughter, with the result that many aboard the ship assumed that this beautiful young woman was his companion. Although it is likely that the relationship between Alice and her father remained innocent, Alice’s relatives on her mother’s side found William’s approach to parenting distasteful and even outright obscene.

  By 1913, William’s fast lifestyle and ever-increasing expenditures were beginning to catch up with him. Some of his investments were failing, but despite this, he continued to spend beyond his means. He had a reputation for extravagance and w
as determined to live up to it. In 1913, he bought himself a top-of-the-line Stoddard-Dayton motorcar with a six-cylinder, 8.6-liter Knight engine, hiring a uniformed chauffeur to drive him around town in it (his daughter would later inherit his taste for luxury American cars). No expense was spared to feed his appetite for ostentation; it is suspected—although not proved—that William was dipping into Alice’s trust fund in order to help with his business debts and to keep himself in the manner to which he had become accustomed. He was also drinking heavily and was almost certainly an alcoholic.

  Then, in 1913, some kind of traumatic incident (or possibly an accident) involving William and Alice took place. Although we do not know the exact nature of the incident, we do know that it galvanized the Armours and Chapins. They became determined to act. That year, Juliabelle’s brother, Uncle Sim, decided to take action against William Silverthorne, applying for Alice to be made a ward of the court. Uncle Sim was a Wall Street broker, and a Chapin to boot. He could use his considerable influence and money to put forward the notion that William was an unfit father, that he had a reputation as a drinker and gambler, that he was failing to educate Alice properly, and that he was embezzling funds from her inheritance. The court in New York ruled in Uncle Sim’s favor. William lost custody of his daughter. Legal guardianship of Alice was awarded to Alice’s aunt Tattie. Juliabelle’s family had achieved their intended revenge: They had taken from William his most precious possession, his daughter.

  For Alice, this must have been a period of extraordinary heartbreak and confusion. She was a thirteen-year-old, on the brink of puberty, accustomed to her father’s affection and indulgences. She would have been oblivious to the questionable morality of her relationship with William. She only knew she adored this man who had been the one constant in her life since the loss of her mother. Now Alice was sent to live with relatives whom she barely knew, in unfamiliar surroundings. Although William was far from an ideal parent, the effect of this severance on Alice was dramatic and damaging. She went from being the object of her father’s constant attention and care to being a complete exile from his presence and love. It's no wonder that as an adult Alice could react with astonishing violence when the men in her life threatened to leave her.

  It was left to Aunt Tattie, Alice’s legal guardian, to look after her, to arrange for her to be educated, and to prepare her for adulthood. Aunt Tattie had no children of her own and no experience of child rearing. Although she was a kindly and well-meaning woman, she hoped to fashion her young charge into an obedient debutante, someone who would slip easily into Chicago’s elite circles. Alice had other ideas. She was entirely accustomed to a life lived on her own terms and did not adapt well to the limits imposed on her by her aunt’s vision. Doubtless exasperated, Aunt Tattie thought it best to send Alice away to boarding school. Alice was uprooted again, sent this time to Mount Vernon Seminary, a school for girls in Washington, D.C. A nonsectarian private school, it had been founded in 1875 by Elizabeth Somers. (The school has since been absorbed into George Washington University.) Alice stayed at Mount Vernon for the next four years. As a student, she excelled at English, and began to develop an interest in writing, publishing short stories and verses in the school’s magazine. One of her poems, which appeared in the Mount Vernon Seminary magazine in 1917—the year that the United States entered World War I—gives us an insight into her state of mind at this time.

  The Storm

  BY ALICE SILVERTHORNE

  A chill light shines in the sullen sky

  With an angry sulphurous glow.

  And a sharp wind sifts

  Through the mountain rifts,

  And whirls the leaves in eddying drifts,

  To die on the earth below.

  The grim-voiced winds are approaching fast,

  Lean clouds slink out of the sky.

  And a terror reigns

  Amid the hurricanes

  That whip the trees with the lash of rains

  As the storm goes sweeping by.

  So when you come, like the great red storm,

  My cares, like the clouds, flee too.

  And my heart leaps high,

  With a happy cry,

  Toward the turbulent blue of the wind-streaked sky,

  Swept free of the clouds by you!

  The poetry, although obviously amateur in nature, reveals a troubled sensibility and an intense longing in Alice. By the age of sixteen, she had suffered the death of her mother, separation from her father, and displacement on a number of occasions. It is hard to imagine that such a headstrong personality, who was used to being constantly appeased, would have adapted easily to the structured environment of a traditional girls boarding school. In her poem, when she longs for the clouds to be “swept free,” it is easy to interpret this as a cry for help to her father, whose leniency she must have sorely missed.

  In fact, the turbulent weather Alice described in her poem had a direct correlation in her emotional life. Around the time of “The Storm,” she attempted suicide. Patsy Chilton—the former wife of Dr. Roger Bowles, who served as a part-time doctor to Alice in Kenya and who knew her well between 1938 and 1941—remembers being told by an American friend that Alice had tried to slash her wrists as a young girl at school. The attempt may have been simply a cry for help, inspired by the hope that her father would come to her rescue. There is no doubt that Alice was lonely and missing William during this period of her life, but it is also likely that she was already suffering from cyclothymia, a strain of bipolar disorder, or manic depression, which would afflict her for the rest of her life. It is extremely common for sufferers of this disease to first experience its symptoms during adolescence, at which point stress or trauma can easily trigger its alternating periods of lows and highs. Although Alice’s attempt to kill herself failed, it had an immediate impact on her life. Shortly afterward, she was taken out of the school and went to live with Aunt Tattie in Chicago.

  Alice was now seventeen years old, extremely pretty, and advanced for her years. At Aunt Tattie’s, she quickly made a new friend, her cousin, the debutante Lolita Armour. Two years older than Alice and already a minor celebrity in Chicago, a young woman whose every appearance was reported in the newspaper gossip columns, Lolita was immediately attracted to her troubled but highly attractive younger cousin. Lolita’s mother, Mrs. J. Ogden Armour, was a patron of music and the arts and spent the war years raising money and helping to boost the morale of the troops. Alice was enlisted to help with the war effort by selling programs at charity events, knitting hats and scarves for the soldiers, and serving tea and coffee at church functions. Lolita also began introducing Alice to Chicago’s debutante circles, filling her in on all the latest gossip and goings-on among the most fashionable families in the city. Despite Alice’s recent difficulties, she found she socialized easily and, thanks to her good looks, was an appealing new presence on the Chicago scene. She was given her own “coming out” ball, after which she was quickly invited to all the good parties and social occasions, attracting the attentions of many of the city’s well-to-do young men in the process. Alice was now a full-fledged member of the Chicago elite. She served as bridesmaid at many of the Armour and Chapin family weddings during this time and appears in formal photographs, an especially attractive girl with a pout. She soon began to outshine all the other debutantes, even her cousin Lolita.

  A newspaper illustration from her debutante years shows Alice’s early beauty to great effect. In the picture, her distinctive wide-set almond-shaped eyes are enhanced with mascara, kohl, and shadow. Her lips—painted and defined—form a perfect bow. Her hair is bobbed and waved, worn to one side, giving her the look of a silent film star, a Clara Bow or a Louise Brooks. Even at such a young age, her gaze in the illustration is assured rather than demure (if perhaps a little sullen). Now in her late teens, Alice had already learned to use her eyes in a highly seductive way, and she had no trouble getting the young men of Chicago to notice her: She would bow her head and loo
k up, without diverting her gaze from the object of her attentions, allowing her suitor to talk, and continuing to look at him while inclining her head from side to side, giving herself an air of wonderment. This technique was highly effective and became a trademark with Alice. She was also nearsighted, but she rarely wore glasses, which gave her gray eyes an especially dreamy expression. Another distinctive feature was her voice, which, by late adolescence, was already lowering in tone. She had a ready and captivating laugh, and threw her head back as she did so. The only aspect of her physical appearance with which she struggled was her hair; it was thick, curly, and hard to control. She changed her hairstyle numerous times during her youth and adulthood, sometimes parting it down the middle, other times braiding it into buns on either side of her head. With the help of a maid or hairdresser she achieved the most glamorous effect by straightening her hair so that it was either sleek against her head or loose around her shoulders.

  Initially, Alice enjoyed the attention she received at parties and in the press, but as she became more accustomed to the Chicago social whirl, she quickly began to tire of it. She possessed an adventurous spirit and hated to be placed in a box. Evidently, she was frustrated by the restrictions and unspoken codes of the debutante lifestyle, where she could barely move without being spotted and recognized. This was a somewhat shallow world ruled by somewhat shallow people who placed enormous value on the “right” makeup and clothes, and who cared most of all about whom you were seen with and where you had gone for dinner the previous night. No end of effort was made to look attractive. Chicago debutantes were known to take the train to New York just to have their faces, hair, eyebrows, and lips made up by Elizabeth Arden on Fifth Avenue before dashing back to Chicago in time to get dressed for the next ball. Alice, a natural beauty, had no such compulsion. She began to find the rounds of debutante parties unspeakably dull. It was at this point in her life that Alice began to explore Chicago’s seamier sides.