A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland Read online

  A Secret Life

  The Sex, Lies, and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland

  Charles Lachman

  Copyright © 2011 by Charles Lachman

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in

  the case of brief excerpts in critical

  reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed

  to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street,

  11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing,

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on file

  9781616082758

  Printed in the United States of America

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARLES LACHMAN IS the author of The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family and In the Name of the Law. He is the executive producer of the television program Inside Edition.

  No matter what, tell the truth.

  —Grover Cleveland, 1884

  I do not want strangers to come and gaze upon my face. Let everything be very quiet. Let me rest.

  —Maria Halpin, on her deathbed, leaving instructions for her funeral

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  1 - BUFFALO

  2 - THE BACHELOR

  3 - MARIA

  4 - “WITHOUT MY CONSENT”

  5 - THE ORPHAN

  6 - PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY

  7 - THE GODDESS

  8 - STIRRINGS OF A SCANDAL

  9 - “A TERRIBLE TALE”

  10 - DEFAMED

  11 - FINDING MARIA

  12 - “A BULLET THROUGH MY HEART”

  13 - THE AFFIDAVIT

  14 - PRESIDENT-ELECT

  15 - ROSE

  16 - THE BRIDE

  17 - DEATH OF A NEWSPAPER

  18 - THE TRIAL

  19 - KEEPER OF THE FLAME

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  THE CHILD WAS born on September 14, 1874, at the only hospital in Buffalo, New York, that offered maternity services for unwed mothers. It was a boy, and though he entered the world in a state of illegitimacy, a distinguished name was given this newborn: Oscar Folsom Cleveland.

  His mother was Maria Halpin, a shopgirl. His father was Grover Cleveland, ten years away from being elected president of the United States.

  Two days after the birth, Dr. James E. King, who delivered Oscar, wrapped the baby in a swathing blanket and went by carriage to the apartment of his sister-in-law, Minnie Kendall.

  Dr. King would not say who the baby was or how he came to be in his possession, but told Mrs. Kendall that he was going to leave the infant with her. The understandably bewildered Mrs. Kendall was pregnant herself; her due date was any day now. How was she going to explain the sudden appearance of a baby to her neighbors? Dr. King suggested that she tell everyone she had had twins.

  Something else was bothering her. The baby had a sore on the top of his head. It looked like an open wound.

  “I don’t want to take it,” she said.

  Dr. King knew that Minnie Kendall and her husband, William, a horse car conductor, were strapped for cash. They had been living on a farm in Kansas before coming to Buffalo four years earlier. Now here they were, in a shabby apartment near the stockyards, with a baby on the way. Her overbearing brother-in-law told her in so many words that she had to take care of this newborn and also be his wet nurse, and she would be paid for it.

  Mrs. Kendall, seeing that Dr. King would not take no for an answer, asked him what to call the baby. Jack, he told her.

  Dr. King had brought the newborn’s clothes with him, and Mrs. Kendall saw that his blanket and all of his outfits were monogrammed “M. H.” There were also several handkerchiefs bearing the name “Maria Halpin.” Dr. King scooped it all up and told Mrs. Kendall he was taking it back and she would have to replace everything. Before he left, he made it clear to her that the infant and their transaction had to be kept strictly within the family. No one could ever speak about what had happened on this day. Its exposure could have tragic consequences for all concerned.

  The submissive Mrs. Kendall, full of questions she did not dare ask, could not help wondering if Baby Jack’s mother, this Maria Halpin, would one day appear at their door.

  Twelve days after Jack came into Minnie Kendall’s life, she gave birth to her son, William Harrison Kendall.

  Mrs. Kendall nursed Jack and William together, and raised them like brothers. Overtime, the sore on Jack’s head healed, and he was growing into a handsome little toddler the Kendalls came to love as their own. With the extra money coming in, they moved to a nicer place on Union Street, in Buffalo proper, and did their best to “hide the traces” of Jack’s existence.

  One morning, Dr. King and his wife, Sarah, William Kendall’s sister, showed up at the Kendalls’ door. They told Mrs. Kendall to immediately gather all of Jack’s things. They were taking him downtown—“to its father’s office.” Mrs. Kendall “rigged the child up” and climbed into a carriage for the trip to the law firm of Bass, Cleveland & Bissell in downtown Buffalo.

  Everyone was crowded into Grover Cleveland’s second-floor law office when an extraordinary scene took place. A woman Mrs. Kendall had never seen before suddenly came in, ran toward her, and “snatched the child out of my arms without saying a word to me.” So this was Baby Jack’s mother, the mysterious Maria Halpin, Mrs. Kendall thought. It seemed to her that Maria was frantic—even “crazy” with grief.

  Maria looked at her son, whom she called Oscar, now fast asleep in her arms.

  “Oh, my baby, open your eyes and let me see them,” she whispered. “Oh, my precious baby, why don’t you open your eyes once more?”

  Maria kept speaking this way to the baby until Grover Cleveland, his face twisted into what Mrs. Kendall called a “rough expression,” like an angry fist, said to Maria, “Give the child up to Mrs. Kendall.” Maria Halpin was crying—“as though her heart would break,” while Cleveland, his voice harsh and insistent, was repeatedly ordering her to turn the baby over to Mrs. Kendall.

  Mrs. Kendall saw Cleveland give Dr. King a “sly wink” and heard him say, “It is all right, Doctor. Have a cigar, Doc.” It upset her to see them so chummy, laughing, while Maria was in tears. She felt nothing but sympathy for the woman.

  When it was time for everyone to leave the office, a veil was placed over the baby’s face, and Mrs. Kendall, with her brother-in-law, walked out carrying him. The purpose of the gathering now became apparent to Mrs. Kendall: “It was to assure Maria Halpin that her child was alive and well.”

  Outside the law offices, on Swan Street, Mrs. Kendall remarked, “How much the child looks like his father.” Before this eventful afternoon she had never heard of Grover Cleveland.

  Dr. King lifted the veil and studied the baby’s face. “Yes, it does look like its father.”

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  BUFFALO

  WHEN GROVER CLEVELAND turned seventeen, the time had come for him to go forth into the world. The year was 1854, and he was living in the tiny hamlet of Holland Patent, New York, about nine miles north of Utica; but it was too inconsequential a place to offer much of a future, so he tried Utica and Syracuse, but nobody seemed to be hiring. It was an exasperating time. Grover passed the evening hours studying Latin to keep his mind alert, but he had to admit to his sister Mary, “I am kind of fooling away my time here.”

  Grover had a pet name for Mary—Molly; she was the big sister he could unburden his heart to. There were nine Cleveland children in all. Stephen Grover Cleveland (he dropped the “Stephen” early on) was born on March 18, 1837, the fifth child of Ann Neal Cleveland and the Reverend Richard Falley Cleveland. Grover was closest to Mary and his big brother William, a student at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, but William had not written in a while, and what he did write said very little. Grover sometimes found dealing with William very frustrating. Mary, though, was giving and wise. Grover wrote her that he was “heartily sick of studying at home,” that he wanted to attend Hamilton College in Upstate New York, but it was a dream he would have to defer. “How is a man going to spend four years in getting an education with nothing to start on and no prospect of anything to pay his way with?” College, he said, with some bitterness, was not going to happen. “That’s gone up.”

  Grover set himself a deadline: Come next spring, at the latest, he was going to be out of Holland Patent.

  From nowhere Grover received a message from Ingham Townsend, a wealthy local property owner with a reputation as a thoughtful benefactor who had offered financial assistance to several promising young men from Holland Patent. Townsend was also a deacon in the Presbyterian church where Grover’s father had been minister. Richard Cleveland died in 1853, at age forty-nine, of acute peritonitis brought on by a gastric ulcer, and Townsend had a genuine interest in doing all he could for the Cleveland family. So it happened that Townsend met with Grover, was very impressed with him, and offered to pay the boy’s way through college. There was one catch: Grover had to make a commitment to enter the ministry following his graduation. Right then, Grover had to say no. That was his father’s and his brother William’s calling, not his. There was further discussion, and an idea came to Grover “like an inspiration.” He now presented it to Townsend. He wanted to go west, to the booming city of Cleveland, Ohio.

  “It’s just the place for a young man to establish himself in,” he told Townsend.

  Cleveland was the city founded by Grover’s forebear, Moses Cleaveland, a Connecticut lawyer and Revolutionary War officer. In 1796, he led a surveying party across Lake Erie to explore the Western Reserve, territory claimed by the state of Connecticut in what is now northeastern Ohio. At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, General Cleaveland beheld a magnificent plain and proclaimed it to be the site of a settlement. It was named in honor of the leader of the expedition.

  In 1820, Cleaveland’s population had reached just one hundred and fifty. By 1854, the city’s name had been shortened to “Cleveland.” This came about because the editor of the local newspaper thought “Cleveland” looked cleaner than “Cleaveland” on the masthead. Cleveland’s population had reached thirty thousand, and the city was on its way to becoming a vital port that, via the Erie Canal, linked the West to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Deciding on the city of Cleveland made sense, even if, as Grover gamely acknowledged, he knew not a single soul there. Settling in a boomtown named for a distinguished kinsman would set him apart from all the other determined young men who were flocking to Ohio.

  “I was attracted by the name. It seemed that it was my town because it had my name,” Grover later said.

  As Townsend listened to Grover sketch out his shrewd plan, he must have admired the magnitude of the young man’s ambition. Right then he offered Grover the sum of $25 to finance his way west. It was a loan, but one that Townsend assured Grover he need never pay back. There was, however, one condition; and as did anything associated with Ingham Townsend, it came positioned as an act of philanthropy.

  “If you ever meet with a young man in a similar condition, give it to him if you have it to spare,” Townsend said.

  Townsend handed Grover the $25 and a promissory note. He would forever be grateful for the money. It was, Grover would say many years later, “my start in life.” Townsend could never have imagined that the simple gesture he made that day would have such profound consequences in American history.

  Grover said good-bye to his family. His mother, Ann, was a fine-boned, pretty Southern belle, the daughter of a wealthy book publisher from Baltimore, when she had married Richard Cleveland at age twenty-three. Coming north as the bride of a young Presbyterian minister had been a culture shock. Though she had been advised in no uncertain terms not to take a black servant from a slave state North, her black maid had begged to go with her, and Ann had brought her along. That, and Ann’s attire, made the villagers suspicious. The maid was sent home, along with Ann’s jewelry and all her dresses of colors other than black, brown, and gray.

  It had been a disciplined household. Every evening the Cleveland children would gather for prayers and brace themselves to be drilled by Reverend Cleveland on the basic principles of the Christian faith. In this manner, Grover and his siblings committed to memory the entire handbook of the Presbyterian catechism. The Sabbath was strictly observed, work and any form of play were forbidden from sundown on Saturday until sundown on Sunday. On Saturday evening, the children lined up for their weekly baths; and on Sunday, all except the babies were required to attend Reverend Cleveland’s two-hour sermons.

  Grover boarded a barge on the Erie Canal for the voyage to Cleveland, Ohio. Accompanying him was another young man from Holland Patent who was also seeking his fortune out west. The Erie Canal was the engineering marvel of the age; some even called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. It was a long and tedious crossing—a winding, sluggish process through beautiful pasture and virgin forest as a team of horses, or sometimes mules or oxen, towed the barge 365 miles across New York State, from Albany to its terminus in Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie. When they reached Buffalo, Grover, exhausted and covered in dust, informed his traveling companion that he had to visit his aunt and uncle in the Buffalo suburb of Black Rock. He said he’d be back in plenty of time to make the connection to Ohio. That was fine with the other fellow, and Grover went ashore.

  Lewis Allen’s home was about two miles away. Grover walked straight down Niagara Street and stopped when he reached the Allen house at the corner of Ferry and Breckenridge. Four years had passed since Lewis had last seen his intense and eager nephew, and it was a jolt to see him again, for now Grover was mature and filled out.

  Lewis was married to Grover’s Aunt Margaret, his late father’s sister. Lewis and Margaret and their two children lived on a fine estate on a bluff overlooking the Niagara River. Two great American statesmen, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, had stayed there as overnight guests when passing through Buffalo.

  Lewis was aware that the Cleveland family had its struggles. Grover’s sister Susan had been born with deformed feet and was being treated by a specialist in New York City. Reverend Cleveland, a graduate of Yale, never made more than $600 a year. His sermons had been earnest, but had never dazzled. He had not sought fame, aspiring to be nothing more than a simple country cleric, what he’d called the “proper location for me.” He’d walked humbly with his God. To his prosperous brother-in-law, Richard’s was a life frittered away. “His modesty killed him,” Lewis once reflected. “I mean, he didn’t have push enough.”

  Grover told his uncle that he was on his way to Ohio and thinking about becoming a lawyer. Lewis always had a high regard for Grover; here was a lad who was not afraid of hard work. When he was fourteen, Grover found a job at a general store for $50 a year, plus room and board. Grover woke at five each morning to open the s
tore, build a fire, dust off the merchandise, sweep the floor, and get everything in shape before the boss arrived at seven. At night, he slept on a plain pine bed with a mattress filled with cornhusk. His room had no stove, and the only source of heat was a pipe from the store’s stove below. The privy was out back. When he was sixteen, still a boy but also a man, Grover spent a miserable year in charge of the boys’ dormitory at the New York Institution for the Blind in Manhattan, a job arranged by his brother William for a “pittance” of a salary.

  As Lewis listened to Grover, something seemed off. What Grover was saying sounded so random. Law schools did not exist in those days. A young man became a lawyer by apprenticing for three or four years and then applying for admission to the local bar association. Connections definitely helped.

  Lewis found himself obliged to point out that Grover did not know anyone in the city of Cleveland—not a “single friend or acquaintance.” Just how did he expect to find a law firm ready to take him on? Grover could not say. Then it was folly to be going there, Lewis Allen told his nephew.

  Lewis tried to persuade Grover to stay in Buffalo, where it just so happened that he was embarking on a challenging project and could use a young man like Grover to help out. He owned a six-hundred-acre farm on Grand Island where he raised Shorthorn cattle. For eight years, he had been obsessively documenting the bloodline of every Shorthorn he owned—a record of his livestock would be indispensable in establishing the herd as a great domestic breed of cattle. Now he was interested in publishing the results for the benefit of farming and stockman circles.

  He proposed that his nephew stay with him for five months and organize everything. The pay would be $50, plus room and board. There was something else that sealed the deal for Grover—his uncle gave him his word that he would do what he could to introduce him to Buffalo’s most “eminent” law firms. It took Grover about five seconds to say yes. He thanked Lewis then tramped two miles back to port, found his friend from Holland Patent, and informed him that he was staying put. He would be settling in Buffalo. Apparently, there were no hard feelings, and the young man carried on with his voyage westward. What became of him, no one can say. He and Grover never saw each other again.