Sometimes when conducting research one stumbles upon a little gem of a story buried within withered documents or obscure archives. This happened to me recently while digging deeper into the life of Jessie Reed, above, the gold-digging Ziegfeld showgirl who married my grandfather Leonard Reno. Tucked among some yellowed newspaper clippings was an item about her and a young heiress who had an affair with Jessie’s second husband, Dan Caswell, scion of a notable family in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s a Roaring 20s fable with unexpected twists and turnarounds.

The rival girl’s name was Katherine Stevens. She was married to Dick Fagan, a handsome Dartmouth grad, but their marriage was on the rocks. She had gone to Reno to get a divorce, met Caswell along the way, flirted with him until Jessie and she had a cat-fight which became fodder for the tabloids. The affair caused Fagan to have a change of heart and he won his wife back. Jessie was left with Dan who turned out to be a spendthrift and a drunk. She divorced him and began an affair with Russell G. Colt, the heir to the arms fortune, and husband of Ethel Barrymore. So something good came of the scandal with Kate Stevens after all.

But what of young Kate? I was curious to know more about this two-timing heiress. Thanks to the internet I was able to delve into her past and uncover some interesting tales of her family. Perhaps the basic facts will be of little interest to anyone else, but I find it fascinating to glean tidbits of yesteryear’s scandals. The stories are at enough of a remove to make them harmless and amusing, rather than tragic and libelous. They are glimpses into a lost world of Jazz Age glamour, but also of the follies of fame and vanity.

Katherine’s story really begins with her notorious father, the miserly C. Amory Stevens. Long before she ran off with Dan Caswell, Kate had endured an enormous amount of press coverage relating to her father’s peculiar habit of residing in a rundown office building. Despite his reputation as the wizard of Wall Street, with millions in the bank, he chose to sleep on a cheap cot, with little or no furnishings. His clothes were threadbare; his grooming unkempt. Stevens’ wife, the socially conscious Jessie Prendergast Stevens, lived in high style in a lavish home. Why did he choose to hide out as a pauper? The press speculated it was because he was pathologically cheap. A deranged skinflint. But the truth was a bit weirder than that.

Calvin Amory Stevens had a history of provoking controversy, once hiring a female detective to masquerade as a woman of the night to lure a business rival to a house of ill repute, so that Stevens could lay claim to a fortune he had hoped to inherit outright. Stevens and his sister, a battle-ax named Mary Richardson, wrestled over family assets. His father had been a millionaire and an adventurous soul (he is mentioned in the Mormon Chronicles from 1875) who went out West to make his mark. But his legacy was tainted by scandal.

In 1885 C. Amory Stevens was sued by his sister for mismanagement of his father’s estate. But over time he was rumored to have accumulated millions of his own through investments and real estate. Or so it seemed. When his daughter Kate ran off with Fagan in a shocking elopement, Stevens was constantly described as being worth $25 million (the equivalent of a billion today). But when old man Stevens died shortly afterward, it was discovered that he had run through his vast fortune and had nothing to show for it. He had been living in squalor not because he was mad, but because he was literally broke.  On April 15, 1925, Stevens’ will was valued at a negative $15,000 in debts. His mining interests in Nova Scotia, New Mexico and Virginia were worthless.

Kate’s story doesn’t end there, however. After a divorce from Fagan and a second marriage to someone named Hofer, she ended up marrying Prince Ibrahim Fazil, a wealthy Egyptian, son of Prince Ali Fazil, cousin of King Fuad. His mother was the Baroness Marthe de Carnap of Naples. A glamorous figure, he’d been involved in a juicy scandal of his own in 1922 when as a young man of 17, he had been accused of having an affair with Marie Cadman Mourilyan, the wife of his Walpole House school chum, Edmund Irvine Mourilyan. When he suspected his wife of infidelity, Mourilyan beat her, then attempted suicide. She took morphine. The case dominated the British press for several weeks as the salacious details of the suit (the husband apparently had venereal disease and collected “indecent photographs”) were splashed across the papers.

Fazil protested his innocence, claiming that he was just a friend of the lady in question. But a maid’s testimony that she’d seen him in pyjamas, kissing her mistress in bed, raised more than eyebrows. In the end, however, he was acquitted of the charges and her honor was restored. Fazil profited from his newfound reputation as a dashing ladies man. He married Kate Stevens in a lavish wedding in London. By then Prince Ibrahim was a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery. The couple, below, remained married, as far as I know, and had children. At some point they adopted the name Foxwood.

The story was perhaps not a happily-ever-after scenario (Kate was arrested for driving under the influence in 1939), but one that was certainly a far cry from the unfortunate series of events that overtook her youthful rival, lovely Jessie Reed, who ended up in a charity hospital in Chicago, alone and destitute. Jessie died in 1940, so broke that the Ziegfeld Club had to raise funds to pay for her funeral. And where was my grandfather? According to press reports at the time, he came to visit Jessie in the hospital, bringing his latest wife along. I can’t imagine that he lingered long or that Jessie was glad to see him. He probably wanted some of his things back.

I’m not sure I’ve gained anything particularly valuable by peering into the lives of these curious souls, the Stevens and Fazil clans. Their role in my research into Jessie Reed is minimal at best. But for me these slivers of the past are like an old newsreel. The news may no longer be of any value, but one can’t help being entranced by the flickering lights and shadows of the passing parade.

Each spring when the horse-racing world turns its eye to Louisville and the Kentucky Derby, I can’t help but reminisce about a trip I took there a decade ago to ferret out my family’s murky past. One of the key places on my list was Calumet Farm, above (courtesy of LIFE), the epitome of Bluegrass culture, synonymous with some of the most famous thoroughbred racehorses in history: Whirlaway and Citation. Ironically, in 1992, when Henryk deKwiatkowski purchased Calumet Farm at public auction, Quest asked me to interview him. At the time, I had no idea that distant ancestors of mine had once lived there.

What was my connection to this legendary stable? Well, it’s a bit convoluted. My mother Muriel Reno Peters died in 1993, leaving behind some scrapbooks belonging to her father Leonard Minor Reno, a noted aviator in the First World War. While perusing these diaries and photographs, I kept noticing pictures of him at a horse farm of some sort. No details were given. But as I began the slow and often difficult process of putting the pieces of his family tree together, I discovered that his mother, Linnie Daniel Reno, was the sister of Georgia Daniel Wright. Georgia had married the founder of Calumet Farm, William Monroe Wright. The two families were very tight and often traveled together.

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1851 (although a passport I found states 1848), he first married Clara Lee Morrison of New York, and had a son, Warren Wright. A “kindly soul”, according to newspaper accounts, William was also an extremely savvy businessman. In the 1890s, he founded Calumet Baking Powder, which proved to be immensely popular with the growing middle class which still made its own biscuits at home. As his wealth increased, he poured his good fortune into real estate and horses.

In 1924 Wright bought the old 1,200 acre Fairland Farm in Lexington, on Versailles Pike, and renamed it after his firm, Calumet. He moved his family and started raising Standardbreds. In 1928, the Wrights sold their interest in the baking powder company to General Foods for $32 million and then turned their full attention to Calumet Farm and breeding champion trotters. Wright’s horse Calumet Butler won the Hambletonian Trotting Classic in 1931, but old man Wright by then was too sick to celebrate.

When William Wright died a month later, at the height of the Depression, he left an estate valued at $60 million. His son Warren inherited $55 million of that and went on to establish Calumet Farm as the premier Thoroughbred-producing stable of its time. My grandfather’s aunt Georgia, as Wright’s widow, was left a generous annual stipend and the right to live at the farm until her death. Sadly, she didn’t live much longer. She had a heart attack in 1936, leaving her stake in the fortune to her daughter, Lucile Page, also from a previous marriage. Sometime in the 1970s, when Lucile Page died, she left my mother a small bequest. None of us at the time knew where the money came from. But clearly it must have come from all those cans of Calumet Baking Powder.

The more I delved into Georgia Daniel Wright, above, and her own obscure roots, the more intrigued I became by my ancestry. Genealogy is one of those pastimes that only appeal to the person performing them. Eyes roll and jaws yawn the moment one brings it up to others. But I was determined to find out more about the Daniel clan and how these two sisters from the backwoods of Tennessee had risen to such heights.

Finding out anything about them was difficult and time-consuming. But eventually I was able to locate death certificates, passport applications, and census records that helped me contrive a spotty but accurate picture. Georgia and Linnie were the daughters of George W. Daniel and Mary Elizabeth Gardner of Weakley County, Tennessee, both of whom were born in the 1830s. Georgia was born in Bonham, Texas in 1861 when her father was stationed at Fort Concho, below, as a surgeon with the Confederate Army. Whether he was enlisted or not, I have not been able to ascertain. They stayed in Texas for a few years, then went back to Weakley County where Linnie was born, and eventually moved to Arkansas.

From there the trail grows cold until Linnie turns up married to Harry Otho Reno, below, in Jonesboro in 1893. Harry had started out as a bellhop at the posh old Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs and was nicknamed “Hot Springs Harry” by his pals. He bought one of the local papers and became a successful newspaperman. Eventually the Renos resettled in Chicago where he founded the H. O. Reno Co., a publishing firm which put out Furniture Age, a trade journal. An avid horseman, Reno most likely introduced his wife’s sister Georgia to William Monroe Wright while attending some horse-related event. The Wrights were married in 1897.

Since discovering these various links, I’ve traveled down to Gardner Station, Tennessee where my Gardner ancestors were from and traced their roots back to the early 1600s in Virginia, although there are some gaps in the Gardner tree that make it difficult to be absolutely certain. If some of these trees I’ve found are true, then I am not only related to Davy Crockett, but the infamous Bell Witch! From there I ventured north and east to Louisville and Lexington, and stopped off for good measure in Lawrenceburg where my father, who ran Austin, Nichols, & Co. used to make Wild Turkey bourbon!

I had less luck with the Daniel clan. George W. Daniel’s father James M. Daniel proved difficult to trace. He seems to have come out of North Carolina and died in 1836 in Weakley County. His wife Susan then appears to have married a much younger man named Josiah Carney and settled in Graves County, Kentucky, leaving her grown children to fend for themselves. It’s all based on census records, which are notoriously unreliable, and I’ve had to challenge some of the claims made by genealogists who have mistaken my Susan Carney with others, thereby muddying the waters further. But I’m pretty sure that I have the right couple as Graves County is just over the border from Weakley. I’d welcome any input from anyone out there taking notice.

Where does all this genealogical digging get me? Well, in the case of the Daniels, it led me to a branch of the family, descended from Georgia’s brothers, who lived in Texas and became multimillionaires in the oil business, via the Daniel Orifice Company. I’m hoping some day that one of them will leave me a fortune. And then there are the Gardners, some of whom I’ve befriended online and actually visited with in Tennessee. It’s fun to find out one has distant cousins. They have all the advantages of relatives but none of the downsides. They don’t expect presents on their birthdays.

Just a week ago, in a whimsical act of self-promotion, I joined Facebook, a little late to the party, hoping to let old friends and business associates know that yes, I am still alive, and to alert them to this blog. It’s been a fascinating and revealing experience. First of all, I had no idea that so many people I know are using Facebook and that they would be happy to hear from me. I had set up a MySpace page a couple of years ago, primarily to plug my bookstore, and about three people contacted me, including Randy Jones, one of the members of the Village People, which thrilled me. But in just a handful of days on Facebook, I now have 120 “friends” (and counting, like that sign in Manhattan ticking off the national debt) and have reconnected with people from all aspects of my past: grade school, Choate, Yale, my singing group the S.O.B’s and long-lost jobs. I even reconnected with one of my favorite counselors from Camp Becket whom I haven’t talked to since I was 14. It’s all a bit overwhelming and exhilarating. The experience is sort of like a giant group grope. I might have gone overboard on Earth Day, the day of my birthday, because I was sending messages to people I don’t even know. But I’m sure that is par for the course when one first joins.

Was it wise to “poke” Brian, a waiter I used to know at the old Moondance Diner when I worked at Quest? I’m sure I was just one of his regular customers and am now no more than a footnote buried in his psyche, even if I remember the exact cut of the apron he used to wear. And why did I search for John Guare, a favorite teacher I’d had at Yale? Could it have been the irony of his now-ubiquitous catchphrase “Six Degrees of Separation”? If anyone is over the implications of that apt phrase it must be John. Likewise, why did I ignore that old flame of mine from 20 years ago? Was it because I wanted him to remember me just as I was and not as I’ve become? There seems to be too much emphasis in the comments posted to the “Wall” (at least in the short-run) on how one looks, or to be more precise, in how one looks the same. We cling to our vain identities just as others cling to their memories of them. I’m glad to hear some people feel I haven’t changed a bit. But at the same time I want them to know that I am not the same person I used to be, that my once-effulgent voice is shot, my shoulder continually hurts, and I can no longer wrap my legs around my neck and jokingly call myself “the human pencil sharpener” as I used to do at dull parties as an ice-breaker in college. I am a very different person today and yet not the same different person to the various friends I’ve re-made.

Plus there’s the “absent friends” problem, the ones without faces on Facebook. While I was zealously seeking out friends to add to my members’ list, I dug up my current phone book which I haven’t glanced at in ages (cell phones make such things obsolete). What struck me instantly was how many friends I’ve still got listed in there who sadly are no longer with us. I’d been extremely negligent in updating my address book and removing or crossing out names of those who had died. Perhaps it was sheer stubbornness on my part — or guilty denial. Why is Jed Mattes still there, my former literary agent who died in 2003? Crossing him out would be like admitting I’d X-ed him out of my life before he died. And acquaintances such as Khalil Rizk, Peter Cain, Robert Woolley or Charles Henri Ford? Surely I can’t have forgotten they’d “passed on” — an expression that I like only a smidgen more than “passed.” But there they are, still scribbled in ink in my little leather book. Then there’s Sarah Pettit, my former editor at Out, who was such an inspiration to me. Clearly, in her case, I was just not willing to finally let go. I think she’d insist on my getting a new address book.

It amuses me to think what these friends would have thought of Facebook and other instant communication devices, especially this new-fangled fad Twitter, which seems to be the final death knell of letter writing as an art form. (In the future a writer won’t be called “a man of letters” but “a man of tweets”.) Some would disdain Facebook. Some ignore it. Others, such as the great gadabout George Trescher or my dear friend Brother Jonathan, a Franciscan monk and playwright who died quite a while back, would have cherished it. I wish, like in the days of Houdini, there were some way of sending messages to these lost friends. I’d “add” them to my list even if they could not “confirm” we were friends, or better yet, answer back.