[NOTE: On hiatus in New York, researching a new project. Therefore, for the time being, I am resurrecting another older piece, this one about The Lodger, which seems very apt now since the new movie version by David Ondaatje, starring Simon Baker and Hope Davis, below, opens today.]

Ladykiller: The Story of The Lodger

A tall dark stranger. Loads of London fog. A coquettish showgirl. The back streets of Whitechapel. A debonair inspector. And Jack the Ripper. These are the ingredients that have made Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel The Lodger such an eternal favorite.

First published in McClure’s magazine in 1911, the mystery, soon issued in book form in 1913, cleverly preyed on the public’s fascination with the Ripper case, which remained unsolved (and still is, despite what Patricia Cornwell might want us to think), and played off the paranoia and hysteria that arise when a ruthless serial killer is on the loose. Lowndes was the sister of the author Hilaire Belloc. And while she may not have had his subtle flair for literature, she had the equally valuable common touch. Her book has been in print since it was first published. In fact, four films have been made based on her novel.

Recently I’ve been on something of a Lodger kick. While researching the wonderful, but now nearly forgotten, actor Laird Cregar, I discovered that the Fox film, The Lodger, was finally out on DVD and available on NetFlix. I leapt at the chance to view it. Starring some of my favorite Hollywood stars, including Merle Oberon, as the disarmingly beautiful showgirl, and George Sanders, as the devastatingly debonair detective, Fox’s 1944 version of the Lodger stands out as arguably the best in the series. But it is Laird Cregar’s performance that makes the film so worth watching. Physically a cross between Vincent Price (particularly his slightly whispered, gentleman’s voice) and Raymond Burr (especially Burr’s soulful eyes and bulk), Cregar is in a league of his own.

Breathing new life into the stereotype of Ripper as a madman, Cregar imbues his character with uncanny pathos and cunning. While it is evident from the beginning of the film that he is in fact the killer, one is drawn to him, just as Merle Oberon is, despite his ungainly physique (Cregar was over 300 pounds at this point), and bizarre personality.

Cregar starts off slow but gradually reveals his character in flashes of brilliance. There’s one scene in particular in which Cregar shows Oberon a small painting of his “brother.” It’s a self-portrait that the artist made, showing a devilishly handsome young man (who looks nothing like Cregar at all). Cregar goes off on a mad monologue about how beautiful his “brother” was, oozing a disconcertingly incestuous and homoerotic obsessiveness that isn’t really in the script. It’s all in the way Cregar delivers the lines — and in his eyes. It is a chilling scene that transports this film from being a typical Hollywood Gothic thriller into a realm of Poe-like surrealism that transcends the genre. And which also makes it uniquely ahead of its time. Blaming the cause of a serial killer’s rage against women on his repressed homosexual urges had not yet become a tired Hollywood cliche.

The same can also be said of the first two Lodger films that starred the great English musical star Ivor Novello. I could go on at length about the appeal of this amazing persona.

Little known today in America, Novello was on a par with Noel Coward in England, writing musicals, starring in films, penning unforgettable songs, producing elegant theatrical spectaculars. He even found the time to write the screenplay for the original Tarzan, The Ape Man film (starring Johnny Weissmuller)! And not only that, he was devastatingly handsome. In the 1920s, Ivor Novello was one of the most instantly recognizable faces in the world.

The first Lodger film was a stylish silent movie directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, in 1926. It can be seen as one of his first masterpieces. And the first in a long line of thrillers. Hitchcock had had another success with Novello in the marvelous silent Downhill. Unfortunately, because of Novello’s popularity, the Lodger story was changed, making Novello merely a suspect in the Ripper case, rather than the actual killer himself. This worked well for Hitchcock’s purposes, as he was a master at creating suspense out of ordinary daily experiences. But the story lacked some punch. Today it is best known for its striking cinematography and Novello’s riveting performance.

In 1932, Novello remade The Lodger, also starring himself. But this time he made it as a talkie. It is similar to the Hitchcock version, but lacks the ingenuity and mise-en-scene that Hitchcock first gave it. Still, it is worth watching since it is one of the few films in which we can hear Novello actually talk. And even without Hitchcock, it holds one’s attention.

A decade later, The Lodger was taken up by director John Brahm, and writer Barre Lyndon, and given the Hollywood treatment. For me this is the most satisfying version for the reasons already given. Laird Cregar’s creepy performance in the Ivor Novello role. George Sander’s unctuously couth inspector. (He would have made a brilliant Sherlock Holmes.)

And where else can one see Merle Oberon dance a can-can?! But most of all it is the brilliant direction of John Brahm, who was known for the early horror film The Undying Monster. The lighting in this version is absolutely breathtaking. When one of the victims is getting ready to go to bed in her squalid flat, she suddenly realizes there is a man in her room. The camera pushes her back against the wall and she covers her face with her hands, letting out a bloodcurdling scream. It is one of the most horrifying scenes ever caught on celluloid, similar in tone to some of the best work by James Whale.

Later, towards the end of the film, there’s a memorable scene in which Cregar is crawling along a catwalk above the stage where Merle Oberon is performing. The light thrust up between the rungs of the crosswalk illuminates Cregar’s face in a pattern of quickly moving bars, eerily reminiscent of the light cast by a silent movie projector. Is this a subtle homage to Hitchcock? Or just a brilliant device? Moments later, when Cregar is backed up against a wall, his face is framed in a painfully harsh light that reveals the tormented monster he truly is.

Brahm and Cregar went on to capitalize on the box office success of The Lodger by crafting a sequel of sorts: Hangover Square.

While not about Jack the Ripper, it tells the story of a psychopathic composer who kills uncontrollably when he suffers spells caused by shrill sounds. It’s a real hoot. And while it doesn’t quite rise to the level of The Lodger, it has some devastating moments. Cregar lost over a hundred pounds prior to taking the role. And boy does it show. He is surprisingly handsome here and the loss of extra weight seems to have freed him to act in new directions. Alas, it was because of his rapid weight loss that Cregar died shortly after making the film.

Why producers felt it necessary to remake The Lodger again in 1953 is beyond me. And why cast Jack Palance as the Ripper? He is so obviously creepy that it undermines the suspense. But this film version, called The Man in the Attic, is worth watching as a counterpoint to the other versions.

Using the same script as the Cregar version, it is almost identical in some shots. I even wondered if they had used some of the footage from the earlier film. There’s one scene where a Bobby is looking for the killer on a rooftop and is attacked by pigeons that is identical to the previous one. Even the costumes seem to have come from the same distributor. But there are very important differences. The showgirl here, played by the very beautiful Constance Smith, sings with a dubbed-in saccharine 50s voice that sounds so canned that it almost smells of sardines. And there’s a bit more flesh. It hardly seems possible that in Victorian England, an actress would strip down to her birthday suit to take a bath on stage.

One of the odder “updatings” is that the character of Smith’s dresser at the theatre is now written as a dour woman from India. Why this change? Was this some underhanded reference to Merle Oberon (seen above in one of her “exotic” moods) who starred in the previous version? Oberon’s Indian heritage was a well-known Hollywood “secret.” And as revealed in the biographical novel Queenie by Michael Korda, based on Oberon’s life, her mother posed as her servant. Perhaps if the film were better, one’s mind wouldn’t wander off on such far-fetched tangents!

The most appalling change is that here, instead of being madly in love with his “brother,” the Jack Palance character shows us a small painting of his mother, an actress who became a streetwalker in Whitechapel when she fell on hard times. The detective informs us that the Ripper’s first victim was this woman, his mother. This is an absurd twist, and a vain attempt to explain his behavior. And worse, it’s a far cry from the odd homosexual psycho-drama that plagued Cregar in his much better version.

In the Jack Palance version, Edward, the Prince of Wales, comes to hear the showgirl perform. This is an ironic touch since years later books would be written claiming that it was Edward’s son, Prince Albert, aka “Eddy” who was actually Jack the Ripper.

So my advice to anyone who cares is that the next time you take a room at a hotel on a business trip or vacation, bring along a copy of The Lodger — and any of its four (make that five) film versions — and curl up in your bed while enjoying it. But make sure to leave the light on.

Today, a new DVD of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the fabled 1945 version starring Hurd Hatfield and a deliciously evil George Sanders, is being released by Warner Home Video. Besides offering a quality transfer, it includes a new audio commentary from film historian Steve Haberman and Angela Lansbury, who played Sibyl Vane, as well as bonus shorts “Stairway to Light” (1945), “Quiet Please!” (1945); and the original theatrical trailer. This is good news for fans of Dorian Gray the world over.

In honor of its debut, just in time for Halloween, I went back to my own copy of the book — a beat-up old pulp paperback from the 50s — and re-read it.

I began to wonder how many versions have been shot of this still shocking tale. What I discovered is that Oscar Wilde’s offspring Dorian Gray has been immortalized in a dozen or so films, as well as in countless stage productions, musicals and operas. There have been postmodern novels penned about Dorian Gray, academic exposes of his roots in Faust and the myth of Narcissus, scholarly essays deconstructing his eternal allure. The Picture of Dorian Gray has the distinction of being the first novel published (1917) in the legendary Modern Library series put out by Random House. His eerie elan has been revamped by pulp fiction hacks, thriller writers, graphic artists, even romance novelists.

There is an absolute litany of knock-offs of Doriana: children’s books, comic books, cut-out dolls, cartoons, LPs, CDs, and audio tapes all celebrating this unique creation:

Even the masterminds behind Superboy have woven elements of the Dorian Gray myth into their storymaking in an episode when Superboy finds his evil doppelganger in a portrait on an easel (below).

Not long ago a biography was written of John Gray, the handsome friend of Wilde’s whose most memorable literary achievement is the fact that he was (allegedly) the inspiration for Dorian. I’m surprised no one has thought of writing a full-fledged biography of Dorian Gray himself. He’s the perfect anti-hero, worthy of the effort. The added upside would be that his life story would never grow old. (John Gray and Josh Duhamel, below.)

A new film version is apparently in the works starring Ben Barnes, the handsome young lead from Chronicles of Narnia. Producer Barnaby Thompson and director Oliver Parker, who previously teamed to make An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest and most recently co-directed St. Trinian’s are in the middle of production right now. (Ben Barnes, below.)

This on the heels of 2004’s version starring former male model Josh Duhamel which seems to have vanished without a trace. In fact, there are so many new incarnations of Dorian Gray coming out each year that one could actually say that he never died at all, and is still walking amongst us, as young and evil — and dangerous — as he was in fin-de-siecle London.

Few modern tales have made as much of an impact as Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. While not exactly a hit at its inception, it has managed to outlast most of its contemporary literary rivals, becoming as well-known as Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest tales of horror, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Shelley’s Frankenstein; Stoker’s Dracula and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

What exactly is it about Dorian Gray that appeals to and fascinates so many generations? Is it the promise of eternal youth? Or the price one has to pay for it? Modern society seems to thrive on building up celebrities with enormous fan appeal, then tearing them off the pedestals on which they’ve been placed and destroying them out of jealousy and revenge. Revenge for what? For reminding us of our own mortality, the loss of beauty and youth, in short our vanity. Dorian Gray is a star because he never grows old. He never disappoints. He never becomes a bore.

There are deeper forces at work in Wilde’s tale than mere vanity of course. Dorian Gray becomes involved in a Faustian battle with sinister powers — which are cleverly never enumerated — harking back to the ancients. It’s a pagan love song of sorts. In order to claim his immortality, Dorian had to sell his soul to the devil, or at least one of his minions. This was amusingly portrayed in the Hollywood version of the 40s by the use of a statue of a cat taken from an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb. Whenever the painting took a turn for the worse, the camera would settle on the cat, as still as stone, with eerie music in the score highlighting its mystery and danger. We never know for sure what caused the painting to grow old instead of its model. But we’re led to believe it was the cat, or perhaps that strange decadent book Dorian keeps reading: A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans.

Oscar Wilde, I think, had simpler parables to preach. It was the act of creating art that Wilde was poking fun at. The artist creates a being out of clay or a bit of paint and it lasts eternally (so long as there is a good art conservator out there) while the subject of the art vanishes into obscurity. Think of Sargent’s masterpiece the portrait of Madame X. She lives on in infamy thanks to the artist’s uncanny knack for exposing her soul, or lack thereof.

As monsters go, Dorian Gray is a bit of a milquetoast. He doesn’t kill that many people. Besides Basil Hallward, who painted the portrait which caused all the trouble, there are practically no victims done in by Dorian’s own hand. Sibyl Vane takes her own life after he disses her performance as an actress. The doctor he blackmails into destroying Basil’s corpse commits suicide. So do many of his rumored sexual liaisons, his opium-eating lovers, his flamboyant fellow decadents. No, Dorian Gray is not a killer a la Jack the Ripper, who did his dirty work for real a few years before Wilde’s novel was published. Perhaps Oscar had him in mind. But Dorian is far subtler. He murders by insinuation rather than by sinning, his ideal beauty the intoxicating poison, as a recent staged play performance indicates (below).

But perhaps, as I noted earlier, Wilde was also commenting on society’s cult of celebrities, himself included. Society is the artist, painting portraits, building monuments, carving figures out of stone like some craven Pygmalion in quest of gorgeous Galateas. Then once the masterwork is done, it destroys it out of spite. This happened to Wilde himself. Perhaps he had a premonition. He certainly masterminded his own defeat. Not only did society bring him down and literally spit on him for his “gross indecencies” (many of which were their own glaring sins) but they also revived him, making Oscar Wilde one of the great immortal figures of literature — a god of style and wit, a martyr for the cause of artists and inverts, the patron saint of gay liberation. He was thrown to the lions for the amusement of the masses, but it is his image of the fallen idol that we worship, not the man himself.

Wilde first wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in July 1890 at the start of his literary career. It was purchased for serialization in Lippincott’s magazine in the United States. It’s ironic that Wilde’s best known and most popular work should have its origins in America — the new world. But that is where Wilde too had made a name for himself, lecturing on aesthetics to the uncouth, and for the most part, charmed masses. Portions of this early, slightly different, but dramatically so, version would come back to haunt Wilde at his trial — or should I say trials — since there were three of them. His attackers read some of the more scandalous lines from the original novella as if they were evidence of Wilde’s personal immorality. The artist was being branded with the sins of his art. Most writers suffer from this problem. A character says one thing and then you find yourself being accused of the very prejudices or moral flaws you were mocking in the text. It’s a no-win situation. But ironically it was these nasty bits that guaranteed Wilde his fame, and the book’s lasting notoriety. For Dorian Gray glamorized horror, making depravity sexy and murder chic. And ironically by not naming “the love that dare not speak its name” which pervades the novel between nearly all of its witty lines, Wilde gave birth to a homoerotic monster that mocks hypocrisy, revealing the naked sinner behind the facade.

For my money, the 1945 film version best captures the exquisite high camp at the heart of this fascinating novel. Despite its being set in a Hollywood fantasy version of Edwardian England, rather than Gay 90s Victorian, it’s stylish and witty and just outre enough that it does justice to Wilde’s intentions. It does veer astray from the original story. The Donna Reed love interest, who first meets Dorian Gray when she’s a child at Basil’s studio, is a creation of the screenwriters, perhaps as a way to further heterosexualize the hero, making the story more palatable to WW2 audiences. It also boasts the best actual portrait of Dorian Gray. TCM explains that it was no accident: “…the hideous portrait…was painted by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright. He was hired after director Albert Lewin saw a painting of his at the Art Institute of Chicago entitled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. In the film, Albright created four portraits showing Dorian’s gradual dissolution and, in the final scene, where Dorian’s true nature is revealed on canvas, the elegant black and white cinematography suddenly bursts into Technicolor, creating a startling effect.”

Some find Hatfield’s impersonation of Dorian Gray a bit too fey and ghoulish. His skin is as opalescent as moonlight on a marble gravestone. But his spin on Dorian grows on me each time I see it. I also happen to really like the Helmut Berger version — sometimes called The Secret of Dorian Gray — which came out in the 70s. It’s far racier and truer to the spirit of the novel, although it does take liberties. But it deftly takes Dorian out of the closet and into the arms of his admirers, both male and female.

The Australian television version from 1973 starring Shane Briant has some good moments, but overall is wan and ineffectual. The male lead, while certainly attractive, lacks that ineffable mesmerizing quality to fully pull it off.

Peter Firth of Equus fame also took a spin in Dorian’s shoes on BBC but failed to fill them. The producers seemed to think that his having golden curls and a baby face would make up for a lack of aristocratic hauteur, although Jeremy Brett, who would later bring a Dorian Gray-like allure to Sherlock Holmes, plays Basil Hallward with a manic fervor. Sir John Gielgud falls flat as Lord Henry perhaps because he was unconvincing as a married rake.

Apparently Wallace Reid, the silent film star, portrayed Dorian in 1913, the earliest film version listed on IMDB. I have not seen that. Nor have I seen the campy TV version, starring Belinda Bauer and Anthony Perkins in which Dorian Gray is a female film star whose debut screen test ages while she never loses her looks. Fans of vintage smut might recall a legendary 70s porn film, The Portrait of Dorian Gay. I, alas, have not seen it. In 2006, Duncan Roy restyled Dorian Gray with an explicit gay attitude. Starring David Gallagher in the title role, it received lukewarm reviews. (David Gallagher, below).

In other realms, Dorian Gray has been transformed into gothic soap operas. There were shades of Dorian in much of Dark Shadows. Rod Serling’s Night Gallery featured an episode in which a series of paintings depicted the resurrection of a murderous cadaver. Modern novels have incorporated Dorian as one of the undead, a villainous vampire who preys on the young. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire had elements of Wilde’s classic in it, most notably in LeStat’s eternal youth and bisexual glamour. The great British dancer Matthew Bourne, who revitalized Swan Lake by having it performed with an all-male cast, has taken a turn as Dorian Gray.

In opera, Lowell Lieberman retuned Wilde’s tale as a melodious ode to nostalgic yearning. In video games and underground comix, Dorian Gray lives on, a role model to aspiring Goths and sexually confused teens. His sphere of influence keeps evolving. Contemporary photographer Vivica Myers has photographed Dorian Gray as a woman in stylish men’s clothes, while writers have revamped the tale with a gender-bending twist, as has Beth Carpenter in her novel Behind the Eyes of Dorian Gray.

For younger folks, Dorian Gray is simply a character played by Stuart Townsend in Alan Moore’s popular series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which was recently made into a film by Stephen Norrington.

Throughout its history, The Picture of Dorian Gray has inspired artists and illustrators, who’ve been drawn to the meaning of the portrait and its macabre presence: the canvas as flesh, an entity unto itself. which must be vanquished.

And publishers have decorated their book covers with a wide variety of different images depicting the portrait of Dorian Gray. It’s really quite amusing how at odds some of these takes on Dorian are. Some of the book jackets place Dorian in the 18th rather than the late 19th-century. Others show him as an effete ephebe; still others as an overly-groomed fop. One of the stranger covers of late is the one which uses a portrait of the composer Franz Liszt! He was strikingly handsome and a great lover, but I have never thought of him as having a shady past.

There are myriad ways of reading the myth of Dorian Gray. That is part of what makes it so endlessly fascinating. Each person can bring to its gothic conceits his or her own interpretations. A child reading it in a Classic Illustrated comic of yore might be drawn to its fairy tale morals. A teenager reading it in a lurid graphic novel might not glean its moral overtones but come away chilled to the bone by its gruesomeness: a painting which oozes blood and pus and bile. A budding drag queen might see in himself the living representation of Dorian Gray; the creature s/he has painted with makeup and outfitted in garish gowns is the portrait — a reflection of the tormented soul within. No two versions are alike. Wilde unlocked a metaphor that has bedeviled us for over a century — a masterpiece of paradoxes.

No doubt Dorian Gray will live on in infamy for centuries to come. At the ripe old age of 118, he’s still as fetching as ever.

Recently a brouhaha of brobdingnagian proportions has been underway in Brooklyn over the tragic demolition of the old Ward Bakery in Prospect Heights in advance of the Atlantic Yards redevelopment. This historic building, erected in 1911, has had many architectural fans who felt its demise was unnecessary and that it deserved landmark status. But none of the articles I’ve seen about it have touched on its connection to one of the strangest and most controversial murder trials of the 20th century.

In the course of research into life in New York in the Roaring 20s, I came across an article in an old newspaper that mentioned the killing of a cocky young sailor named Clarence Peters. His last name alone caught my eye, since its my own, but there was also something about the sailor’s sad, yet handsome, face staring back at me from the rotogravures in dozens of newspapers trumpeting his violent death that made me stop and read on. It turns out that Clarence Peters, who was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, was shot to death at 19 and left on the side of an isolated road near the Kensico reservoir outside Valhalla in Westchester County on March 15, 1922.

Rather than being dumped, his body had been carefully laid out on the ground as if for a funeral. This would prove to be one of the many curious details swirling around his slaying that added to its unique air of mystery and suspense. For if someone is shot to death at close range, the victim doesn’t usually drop to the ground and lie down as if he were about to take a nap. The body falls rapidly and splays out in several directions and at various angles.

Peters’ bloody, yet perfectly placed corpse was discovered the next morning by two telephone linemen and reported immediately to the police. From the beginning, the case stumped investigators. First of all who was this young man and how did he end up in Rye? Thanks to fingerprints on file with the Marine Corps with whom he had recently applied for admission, the police identified the luckless lad as Clarence Peters, a former sailor and petty criminal. For nearly a week his death remained a mystery. Who had pulled the trigger?

At first it looked like the work of a serial killer or perhaps a mob hitman, but finally on March 22, the true killer came forward: Walter S. Ward, the good-looking millionaire son of George S. Ward, the famous baking magnate. Overnight, the case became a sensation from coast to coast. Front page headlines screamed the details of “the millionaire killer.” Walter S. Ward was nicknamed “The Tanned Sphinx” for his cagey reserve. The Ward Baking Company was as well-known in its day as any major corporation is today. It had its own baseball team, the Tip Tops, named after their most successful line of packaged bread. So the story was a natural for the tabloids.

Walter S. Ward, a 32-year-old dashing Yale alum, claimed he killed the sailor in self-defense after being entangled in a blackmail scheme that turned violent. Ward, who was an amateur boxer with a well-developed physique, worked for his family at the Ward Baking Company, but also served as Police Commissioner in New Rochelle, where he lived with his wife and two children. Despite his glitzy pedigree, he had a history of hanging out at race tracks, boasting of losing $20,000 in a single poker game, and associating with some pretty rough characters. He held that Peters was part of a gang of three men he’d met at a race track who were extorting huge sums of cash — some $75,000 in 1920s dollars — from him in payment for squashing a scandalous secret. At first, Ward was willing to fork over the large payments of hush money so long as they kept his family out of it. But when they came back for more and threatened to kill Ward and his wife and two young children, he said, he had no choice but to shoot Peters in a scuffle. He then left him dead on the side of the road. The other two men escaped. Ward claimed one of them had been wounded. He named the third as Charlie Ross, a notorious grifter and blackmailer. A nationwide manhunt was instigated to find these two men and bring them to justice. They were never found.

As the case unfolded with daily reports in all the newspapers, Walter’s lovely wife Beryl, nee Curtis, a glamorous former society debutante, stood shakily and tearfully by his side and defended his honor. Why did his honor need defending? Hadn’t he killed the criminal in self-defense to protect his family? Well, there were unsettling details in the case that were not easily swept under the rug. First of all, what was the secret that was so scandalous and shameful that Ward was willing to cough up enormous amounts of money to Peters and his cohorts in crime? He refused to divulge what that secret was. His brother Ralph also refused to discuss it even though he admitted he knew what it was. Walter’s father refused to come back to New York from Pennsylvania, where he was on business, in order to testify. The implications were that Walter’s secret was so big that it had the potential to destroy his family, and the Ward Baking Company to boot.

The strain was overwhelming. It soon came out that Walter S. Ward had drunk an entire bottle of iodine a few days before the murder. His wife found him lying on the floor and called the doctor. Was this the desperate act of a man attempting suicide, as some claimed? Or an unfortunate accident, as his wife stated? She and his doctor said Ward was prone to violent headaches and had ingested the poison by mistake thinking it was medicine. And what about the co-conspirators? If there were two others involved in the shooting where were they now? If Ward had in fact been shot at first why were there no shells found at the scene of the crime? Why did neighbors not hear any gunfire or see any car lights the night of the murder? If, as Ward had claimed, he had shot Peters through the glass window of his Peerless Coupe, why was there no broken glass on the road where the body was found? Ward’s chauffeur reported that he only noticed a broken mirror on the car’s side door. Could the murder have happened somewhere else?

If Ward had shot Peters in the chest, why was the boy’s waistcoat buttoned up and no bullet hole or blood stains found on it? If Peters was part of a gang who had been threatening Ward for weeks, and with whom he’d met previously, how could Peters have been stationed in Paris Island, South Carolina, the day before he was killed? A former sailor, he had recently attempted to join the marines and was in training there. His request was denied and he was shipped out on the 13th of March, just two days before his alleged rendezvous with Ward. Ticket stubs and affidavits of other marines confirmed these details. How could he have been part of some premeditated extortion scheme?

What exactly was Ward’s relationship to this 19 year old sailor? Speculation was abundant but restrained. Journalists gingerly and delicately danced around the topic. A few isolated reports surfaced that he had been seen with the boy in Boston at a raucous “party for men” at some sleazy hotel. There were “unsubstantiated” rumors that Ward was known to haunt Bryant Park in Manhattan and pick up sailors and treat them to a meal at local cafes and pubs. If Peters was blackmailing Ward for several months, why did he not have any money? Yes, he boasted to his friends at marine training camp that he had easy access to money whenever he needed it, but was this a reference to his skills as a blackmailer, a petty thief, or his ability to soak lonely rich men who fancied his company? When he died he only had a little over a dollar on his person.

No, the more one probed into the actual facts of the case, the more peculiar it became. There was the so-called “bridge party” that Mrs. Beryl Ward hosted at her house in New Rochelle the night of the murder. Witnesses claimed it was actually an all-night poker game. Ward had been expected home but he had not shown up until late the next morning. What was the significance of the deck of cards which had been found after the murder? Instead of 52 cards there were only 47 in the pack; the deck was missing a straight flush of diamonds. Had this been a key element of the case or just a bizarre coincidence? Was Peters a card shark? Did Ward kill him after losing at poker? There were also rumors that Ward’s marriage was on the rocks before the tragic events took place.

And what was one to make of the very odd fact that the Smith & Wesson gun which was purported to be the one Peters had attempted to use on Ward to extort cash and which proved his own death weapon had actually been given to Walter S. Ward the year before? And what was one to make of the testimony of James Cunningham, an ex-private eye and racing crony of Ward’s, who claimed he saw Ward shoot Peters at his home and that Ward was in on the blackmailers’ plot in an effort to extract cash from his rich but stingy father? There were more twists and turns in this bizarre case than on the finely carved banister of the Ward mansion’s staircase.

The more one looked into the Ward melodrama, the less likely it seemed that Walter was an innocent victim defending his family and his honor. But Walter’s father George S. Ward, (above) who had helped build the famous baking empire that bore his family’s name, hired the best lawyers his bread could buy. Raised in Pittsburgh, where the baking business first flourished in the 1890s, George S. Ward had become one of the richest men in America. His was a true Horatio Alger saga. His father Hugh Ward had come from Belfast, Ireland and opened a bakery in New York City in the 1840s, then moved to Pittsburgh to capitalize on its rapid growth. By 1911, Hugh’s sons Ralph and George had expanded the business across the country. They were the first to industrialize the making of bread, jettisoning horse-drawn carriages in favor of trucks and thereby eliminating the need for stables which had been a health hazard in the past. In 1911, George Ward built the giant Ward Bakery in Brooklyn that remained in operation until 1995. George’s brother Robert founded the Brooklyn Tip Tops baseball franchise, part of the Federal League, named for one of its best-selling lines of bread. Walter Ward had worked with his uncle in managing the team.

Faced with a devastating scandal at home, George S. Ward used all of his political connections in Westchester, where he and his sons now lived, and beyond in the State Senate to squash the court proceedings. What seemed like an open and shut case when first Ward confessed to the murder soon unraveled and became a long-drawn out fiasco of false starts and ingenious legal delays. The trial was postponed several times. A motion was made to dismiss the case due to lack of evidence. Ward may have confessed to the crime but should a man be allowed to write his own death warrant, editorials asked? Where was the evidence? his defense attorneys demanded. The burden of proof was on the state and on Attorney General Carl Sherman who had personally taken on the prosecution. But the government’s lawyers only had Ward’s word and that was not exactly reliable under the circumstances. Little effort was made to solve the case. Forensics were bungled. The case languished in the courts while interest in it only grew more intense. Eventually, after more than a year of legal wrangling and subterfuge, the distraught parents of the victim, Eldridge and Inez Peters, turned to Governor Al Smith who intervened on their behalf and demanded a grand jury investigation and that Ward stand trial.

In September 1923, some 484 days after Clarence Peters’s body was found, the Ward Murder Trail finally began. Isaac N. Wills was hired as the defense attorney. Justice Wagner presided. Attorney General Carl Sherman represented the state. But right off the bat, the prosecution made a strategic blunder by forcing Beryl Ward to testify against her will even though it is highly unusual for a wife to be called as a witness against her husband in a capital case. But they had few reliable witnesses and needed her testimony. Evidence of blackmail was scant and sealed since the defense argued that the reasons why Ward was being blackmailed were irrelevant. As the crafty defense lawyer put it, “We do not want the blackmail secret — this slander of which you have heard — given to the public.”

So the exact nature of Ward’s “scandalous” past was never brought up, and most newspapers referred to vague indiscretions of his youth, to a mysterious woman whom he had once “compromised” in Pittsburgh when he worked for the family baseball team. Others claimed he had a notorious “gay love nest” on West 120th Street in Harlem where he entertained a steady stream of young ladies, in particular a fiery redhead. A few suspicious reporters, however, ferreted out that Ward’s “shame” had more to do with “immoral acts, practices and disgrace” that would “impute said son” of the wealthy baking dynasty. What these immoral acts were has never been fully revealed, although the recent book Sexual Blackmail, by Angus McLaren, states categorically that Ward was leading a double life as a homosexual and that he killed the sailor because Peters was blackmailing him. McLaren argues that the defense used the jury’s innate distaste for the subject to its advantage, showing the all-male jury members photographs of Walter S. Ward and his lovely wife and two children and asking if it was possible that such a man, who had such a beautiful family, and was a pillar of his community, a former police commissioner and successful businessman, could ever do such a thing.

What Mills actually said, in an impassioned 4-hour summation, was how could such a man as respectable as Ward ever be a “murderer.” Perhaps McLaren is reading too much into it. But this is one of those mysterious cases where one has no choice but to interpret between the lines. Was Walter S. Ward secretly homosexual? Or bisexual? Or was he being falsely framed? My own view, based only on reading the old newspaper accounts, is that Ward may have picked up the sailor, or vice versa, then things got out of hand and he shot him without premeditation. Perhaps Peters had hit him up for some money and Ward was offended. Maybe the sex got too rough and Ward felt the need to defend himself. Then Ward dreamed up the blackmail excuse perhaps because in the past he had been blackmailed and it seemed like a logical explanation. Or maybe it happened just as Ward said it did. Only he and Clarence Peters will ever know.

The end result, however, was that Walter S. Ward walked. Despite Attorney General Sherman’s pronouncement that “No sane jury could acquit Ward,” the jury very quickly exonerated him. When the verdict was announced — “Not Guilty” — Walter’s handsome “broad-shouldered” brother Ralph, who had been by his side throughout the ordeal, “threw both arms around him and kissed his cheek fervently.” Walter Ward hugged his wife, who was “on tiptoe and breathless”. He then went out of the courthouse and was greeted with tumultuous applause by onlookers and well-wishers, many of them women who’d come to ogle his good looks. According to a reporter, “Scores of flappers in upper windows across the street called to him. Ward snatched his gray fedora hat and waved vigorous reply.” Newspaper editorials were less ecstatic. Many of them complained bitterly of a double standard in the courts of justice. That the rich can get away with murder, while the poor have no recourses. It’s a point that writers such as Dominick Dunne continue to harp on today. Justice may be blind, but money talks loud and clear.

The denouement was hardly an anti-climax. Walter S. Ward went back to work for his father, then started his own company called Electrux. He and Beryl tried to make their marriage work. But soon it unraveled. In 1926, in a twist not that dissimilar from the O.J. Simpson case many decades later, Ward was sued in civil court for damages by the family of Clarence Peters. Rather than pay up, he faked his disappearance, leaving a car behind as evidence of what many assumed was suicide, then skipped town. A 9-month dragnet could not turn up his body. He was AWOL, eventually turning up in Havana, Cuba where his family had a large estate. He then by all accounts vanished into obscurity. That’s not quite true. I found a record of him in 1940, then nearly 50, sailing with his stepmother Donna Ward on the Oriente from Cuba. He gave his address as the Hampshire Hotel in Manhattan. He was probably returning to attend his father’s funeral since old man Ward had died in September of that year. As for the very beautiful Beryl Curtis, she got a Reno divorce in 1926, claiming “infidelity, failure to provide, and desertion.” She took custody of their two children, Betty and Willard, and married a wealthy stock broker, W. Lyle Alderson. She later lived on Cape Cod and died in 1975. Walter S. Ward did not survive his father by many years. He died in Cuba on May 22, 1946, leaving a widow and a daughter, according to the Times. Little is known about his self-imposed exile in Havana. But one thing is certain — he took his secret to the grave.