The Mad Sculptor (14 page)

Alone with her in his room, seated together on the edge of his bed, he would spend hours expounding on his theories, which had grown increasingly bizarre in the months since he left California.

“There’s only one thing in the universe that counts,” he explained. “Some call it the Universal Mind, some Spirit or Soul or the Life-Force. The Old Greeks called it the Logos. Today we call it God. It has a thousand different names but they all mean the same—that unseen
Something
that fills the whole wide universe with life and meaning, the way a broadcasting station fills the air with music.

“Now, in every human being evolution has given us a mechanism to make contact with that station—our brains. But since we are creatures of the material world, our brains can only catch a tiny portion of that heavenly music. We’re like Hottentots. Give a Hottentot a radio and tell him to turn it on and he’ll just turn the dial around and around and all he’ll get is a bunch of squawks. But someone who knows how to run a radio can get beautiful music out of it from any station he wants.

“Do you get what I’m saying?” he continued, growing more excited by the moment. “This Universal Mind I’m talking about is, by its very nature, all-wise and all-powerful. It knows every damn thing there is to be known and can do any damn thing that can be done. So once we know how to work our mental radios correctly, we’ll be
able to learn anything just by tuning in to the right station and pulling it out of the air—Greek or Latin or art or mathematics. And not just any mathematics but such mathematics as would make Einstein’s head swim. The Universal Mind would broadcast it directly into our brains, just”—here he stuck out a hand and gave a sharp snap—“like
that
!”

The question, of course, was “How do we learn to run this radio? How can we enter this new and glorious world?” And the answer, according to Bob, was obvious: through visualization.

“Let me ask you this,” he said, leaping to his feet. “How do we manage to move or lift a finger or do any god-darn thing? Through our five senses, pretty miss, through our five senses. All our perceptions of the
material
world are transmitted to us through sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell. So if you put two and two together, you can see that the only way we can ever hope to explore the
higher
world is to develop our
mental
senses. Now the sense we use most is sight. So it naturally follows that if we can develop our inner, mental sight—if we can see things absolutely clearly with our mind’s eye—we’ll achieve such mastery over the world as no man ever dreamed of. And here’s the whole thing in a nutshell: to develop this sight, you simply exercise it just as you would exercise a muscle. In other words, you sit down every day and practice visualizing.”

Exactly how developing a visual skill would allow someone to hear heavenly music wasn’t entirely clear. Alice, however—who, despite her exerted attempts to follow Bob’s harangue, was finding it harder and harder to keep up—said nothing.

“I wonder if you realize just what this whole thing means,” said Bob, staring down at her. “Everyone’s read Shakespeare. How much do you remember? Very little. And yet it’s all there, right in your head, every line, every word, every syllable. And let me tell you, baby, once you learn to visualize, you’ll be able to go to bed at night and lie there in the dark and open
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
or
Othello
in your mind and read the whole damn thing with your eyes closed. And what’s more you’ll be able to
see
those plays enacted in your mind. Those characters will step forth in living projected reality and
play their parts like actors on the stage—only with infinitely greater artistry and majesty and power. Have you ever seen a movie twice? We all have. Well, once you learn to visualize, you’ll be able to stay home the second time and see that movie in your mind any time you please.

“Do you sense the magnitude of this thing?” he cried, waving his hands so wildly that Alice feared he would knock over the bedside table lamp. “Holy mackerel, there are no limits to it. It’s beyond our dreams. After you became an expert at visualizing, you could amass more knowledge than the wisest man ever dreamed of possessing. How? Just go to the library every day and pick up book after book and turn the pages without reading them, and you’d have every word in every book in that library by heart and you could read it any time in your mind without any effort at all.”

Stepping to his bureau, Bob rummaged in a drawer and came out with an art-book illustration that he handed to Alice. “Here, take a look at this picture of Napoleon for a minute. Now close your eyes and try to visualize it. Can you see him standing there on the rock of St. Helena, wearing that old hat of his and the great gray overcoat? Can you see the set look on his face? His great sad eyes, his Roman nose, his mouth, his binoculars hanging from his neck, his hands clasped tight behind his back, his white pants, his black boots on the rock? Can you see how he sticks out his jaw in that stubborn way of his? Can you see the majestic ocean rolling beneath the rays of the setting sun, can you hear the roar of the surf, can you feel the stiff ocean breezes on your cheeks, can you smell the salt tang of the sea? Can you see it clearly just as though you were there?

“Pretty tough, isn’t it?” he said, removing the picture from her hand and returning it to the drawer.

“Here’s the thing, though,” he said, coming to stand before her again. “You’d be surprised how easy and interesting it becomes when two people work on it together. All the difficulties disappear and it becomes the most fascinating game you ever tried.”

When Alice expressed some confusion about the exact nature
of the “game,” Bob explained that, over the years, he had clipped nearly ten thousand pictures from books, newspapers, and magazines. Each had been glued to a sheet of paper and labeled with a title. He was looking for a partner who would play the role of “title caller.” Seated across the room from him, the caller would select a picture at random and, holding it so that Bob couldn’t see it, read its title aloud. Bob would “then proceed to describe the picture in minute detail from memory.”
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Dropping to one knee in front of the startled young woman, he took her hands in both of his. “Alice,” he said, staring into her eyes, “if only you and I could work together on this, there’d be no limit to the things we could do. You know what I’d like to do? Go off to some lonely lighthouse with you. It would be just the thing for us—nothing to take our attention away, no eight-hour workday, no dances, no shows, no friends to bother us. I want so much to get away from the trouble and turmoil of this material world into the solitude of some such place until I could master this. I don’t know what you think, but I could be happy—supremely happy—out there with you.”

It took a moment for Alice to find her voice. “Are you proposing to me, Bob?”

“God knows that if you want looks, connections, money, and all that sort of thing, you can make a hell of a lot better match than me,” he said. “But if you and I could just work together, what progress we’d make. Why, the potentialities of the whole business are almost beyond our grasp. Of course, it will take some time until we get our ears fully attuned to the music of the Universal Mind—maybe twenty years. But in the meantime, you and I would be so in love with mastering this thing that material pleasures wouldn’t really matter to you.”
²⁶

Unless she dreamed of living in a lighthouse and practicing visualization for twenty years, Bob’s idea of wedded bliss couldn’t have seemed very alluring to Alice. Still, it’s easy to see how an impressionable young woman might be taken by his good looks, talent,
ambition, and seemingly brilliant mind. In the fall of 1929—the precise date is impossible to determine—Alice Ryan agreed to become Bob Irwin’s wife.

A few weeks later, Bob received a letter from Joe Halliburton, a friend from his days in Los Angeles. Halliburton—who regarded Bob as “one of the most talented people he ever knew”—had a younger brother, Arthur, who had just moved to Chicago from Alabama to study at the Art Institute. Arthur had been staying at the local YMCA but was unhappy because the place (so he claimed) was full of sexual degenerates. Joe was wondering if Bob knew of any decent, affordable lodgings for his kid brother, someplace where he wouldn’t be surrounded by “a bunch of perverts.”

As it happened, there was another vacant bedroom on the second floor of Mrs. Taft’s home that she was happy to rent for the same rate that Bob was paying—five dollars a week. In October 1929—at around the time of the great Wall Street crash—Arthur Halliburton became Bob Irwin’s housemate.

Though he was an art student at the time he knew Irwin, Halliburton would end up as a journalist, with a long and varied career as a reporter for the King Features Syndicate, an editor and crime writer for the
New York Sunday Mirror
, a contributor to national magazines like
The New Yorker
, and, in later life, the owner of a small Florida weekly, the
Baker County Press
. Years after his former housemate gained nationwide infamy, Halliburton would recall his time living with Irwin, providing a firsthand account of that moment when Bob’s life—and sanity—began to seriously unravel.

At first, Halliburton reported, Bob was “very friendly” to him, introducing him to the other young men on the block, who welcomed him into their little group and included him in their various recreational activities, including their regular backyard boxing matches. It wasn’t long, however, before Bob began to get on his nerves.

“He always talked about himself to the exclusion of any other subject,” wrote Halliburton. “He was a complete egomaniac.” He
seemed shockingly ungrateful to Lorado Taft, who had given him so much encouragement and support. The path to fame that Taft had followed—his slow, patient rise, through unrelenting effort, from obscurity to renown—filled Bob with nothing but scorn.

“I don’t intend to gradually build up a reputation,” he declared. “Sooner or later I’ll hold in my hands and in my head an inconceivable power—and once I do I’ll have this world by the tail. And then I won’t need
anybody’s
backing!”

When Halliburton expressed curiosity about this “inconceivable power,” Bob took him into his room, showed him his “immense file of pictures,” and gave him a lecture on visualization. Far from being impressed, Halliburton became convinced that “Irwin had no pre-imagination, none whatsoever. That was his whole problem. He could imitate things. He couldn’t create things.” Halliburton’s failure to appreciate his housemate’s genius did not sit well with Bob. Their relationship quickly deteriorated.

A few weeks later, while hanging around with their neighborhood pals, Bob challenged Halliburton to a friendly sparring match. They spent most of the first round circling each other and exchanging a few jabs. No sooner did the second round start, however, than—as Halliburton later recounted—“Irwin tore into me very furiously and surprised me by knocking me down.” Bob, who loved to flaunt his physique and boast of his fighting prowess, raised his arms in triumph, as though declaring himself champ. It was a “great injury to his pride,” therefore, when, during the following round, Halliburton unleashed a flurry of blows that sent Bob sprawling. His face flushed with anger and humiliation, he demanded another round, but Halliburton refused. For days afterward, Bob refused to speak a word to his housemate.

The climax of their relationship occurred about a week later. Halliburton, who never forgot the terror of the moment, vividly recalled it years later:

One cold night I came into the kitchen. Mrs. Taft used to leave food for me to eat. I sat down in the corner of the kitchen at the
table. The stove with the oven door was open and the gas was turned on. Irwin was drying some socks in the stove. I said to him: “Bob, that doesn’t seem like a very good place to put your laundry, in a place where someone is eating.” Without any comment or word of warning, he suddenly attacked me, leaned over the table and hit me some hard, stunning blows. I was trapped and almost helpless. By the time I could wiggle my way out, I was badly hurt. He was off in a fury. To me the situation was very bad.…I was trying to push him off, but then I saw it was hopeless and tried to fight, but I was already beaten. I was bleeding so much from the nose and mouth that the floor became slick with blood. I wanted to end this, picked up a milk bottle and was going to hit him on the head. But I didn’t have the strength do it. He just kept beating me on and on and on. By then a man from next door came running in and tried to stop him. But he was too little. Somebody called the police. Suddenly Irwin slipped on the blood. I seized the opportunity to run downstairs. I ran down and he ran after me. We struggled a while but then I got away. I went next door to a friend’s and spent the night. The next day I moved to a hotel nearby.

When word of Bob’s savage assault got around, he found himself an outcast. “None of the fellows in the neighborhood would speak to him after that,” wrote Halliburton. “One fellow told me that Bob came up to him a few days later and tried to start a conversation,” wrote Halliburton. “But he just turned away.”
²⁷

Having alienated his entire circle of friends, Bob proceeded to cut himself off from the man who had shown him such kindness and done so much to advance his career. Leaving Taft’s studio, he took a job at a company called United Pressed Products, designing plastic novelty items for sixty dollars a week—twenty more than Taft had been paying him. Money had become increasingly important to Bob since he hoped to quit work entirely and live off his savings while perfecting his powers of visualization. He had a fantasy of becoming rich by mass-producing little plaster busts of celebrities—Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Jack Dempsey—and selling
them for one dollar apiece. Recognizing the star power of America’s most infamous gangster, he even put in a phone call to Al Capone, who had just been paroled after serving ten months on a concealed weapon conviction and was holed up in the Lexington Hotel. Bob, who hoped to persuade “Scarface Al” to pose for him, managed to get through to Capone, who politely refused, explaining that he was about to leave for his Miami estate.
²⁸