The Napoleon of Crime (32 page)

Kitty’s determination to invent and reinvent herself (and to be reinvented by others) had first endeared her to Worth, a community of spirit that lay at the core of the only human love affair he had ever known. Together they had emerged from nowhere to become persons of substance; Kitty, like Worth, had carved herself a place in the world with other people’s money. Kitty married her money; Worth stole his; but they were in many ways birds of a feather, co-conspirators in the great fraud of Victorian morality and appearances.

Yet there was an integrity to Kitty which Worth, in common with so many Victorians, signally lacked. Worth had managed to convince everyone, including himself, that his vast wealth made him a better person, a morally superior being, even though his means to that end were resolutely dishonest. Kitty had been equally steely-eyed in her determination to reach the top by using her manifest talents; yet, while this had led her into some dubious company, she had not lied, cheated, or stolen to get there. Kitty, like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, had remained faithful to her rumbustious character and gave not a fig that the world knew it. Such personal honesty was beyond Worth’s grasp, which was perhaps why he loved her, and envied her, to the death, and beyond.

Kitty Flynn, the girl from the Dublin slums, was buried in the Terry family mausoleum in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, the most exclusive graveyard in New York, with an imperious view over New York harbor to the skyline of Manhattan. “
It is the ambition of the New Yorker to live upon the Fifth Avenue, to take his airing in the Park, and to sleep with his fathers in Green-Wood,”
The New York Times
once noted. Kitty would have been delighted at her final resting place; she never disguised her desire for distinction, or her willingness to do whatever it took to get there. She had chaffed with seamen in Liverpool, danced with shysters and crooks in Paris, flirted with the rich bachelors of Manhattan, and ended up an enchanting, litigious queen of society, the richest of the rich, consort of princes, magnates, and tycoons, but always the same woman at heart. And now she lay in Green-Wood, the Irish colleen with the merry eyes, laughing at them all. Her final neighbors were illustrious ones. Not far away lies Lola Montez, another famed consort whose lovers included Franz Liszt, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, and Alexandre Dumas, and one of her nearest neighbors in the vast cemetery is Henry J. Raymond, founder of
The New York Times
and pillar of the Establishment, whose good name had been stolen by her bad lover in perpetuity.

“
She had lived enough history to make most women old before their youth,” pronounced the
New York Herald
, but she had remained young.

Many years before she died, Adam Worth had lost his onetime lover and spiritual partner in their strange dance, and although she spurned him, he had perhaps retained something of her in the fascinating Gainsborough portrait that bore her willful, wileful gaze. Now, with her mortal passing, the last gossamer link was gone. His wife was mad, his lover and his friends were dead, his children across an ocean. The horses, yachts, books, furniture, shooting parties, and respectable acquaintances had all gone, too, along with his health and strength, and all Worth had to show, or not to show, was a gorgeous painting gathering dust in a distant warehouse vault, as completely incarcerated as he was himself.

Worth would eventually attain literary immortality as Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and his partner gained her own niche in popular culture. The story of how Kitty Flynn posthumously made it to Hollywood is almost as peculiar as her own picaresque life story. The year 1945, one half century after Katherine Louise Flynn Bullard Terry was laid to rest, saw the publication of
Kitty
, the latest romantic novel by Rosamund de Zeer Marshall, author of such bodice-ripping romps as
The General’s Wench, Rogue Cavalier
, and
Laird’s Choice
.

Kitty
is a very odd book. Ms. Marshall appears to have absorbed many of the elements of the story of the theft of Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire
, allowed them to swill around in her head, and finally come up with a fictionalized story of her own—a hybrid, or perhaps a mongrel, of the truth. Marshall’s
Kitty
is written in the first person and comes complete with heaving breasts, ripped silk, tight corsets, showers of kisses, and, in obedience to some immutable rule of romantic writing, euphemism-laden sexual congress at least once every fifteen pages.

Cheerful, kindly Thomas Gainsborough encounters the eponymous Kitty, a waif and harlot of London’s East End, in Pall Mall sometime around 1785. Gainsborough paints her, and through the painter she meets “
handsome, devilish, Hugh Marcy,” a cad who immediately beds her and continues to do so, at intervals, for the next two hundred pages. Sir Hugh (for he is a baronet) vows to make his street urchin into a duchess, and under his direction she learns to comport herself like a lady, whereupon he immediately falls in love with her.

Kitty first marries a rich ironmonger, who conveniently dies, and then the elderly and grossly landed Roy Fitz-Alen, Marquis of Ruthyn, Count of Lonmore, Baron of Harden, and, most important, 23rd Duke of Malminster—who dies even more conveniently, leaving Kitty as the staggeringly wealthy Duchess of Malminster and reigning queen of aristocratic society. Marriage to a duke does nothing to impede her activities with Sir Hugh, partly because the old duke has no lead left in his pencil, but mostly because she likes it, as does Ms. Marshall, evidently: “
The velvet caress of his kiss was like a million lips on my naked body … he parted the deep folds and gazed at me and slowly traced one finger breast to navel …” And so on.

Kitty becomes involved in politics as a Whig reformer and is painted by Thomas “
Just call me Tom” Gainsborough again, this time as a duchess. “
You are by far the most magnificent of my subjects,” he tells her. All London, including the Prince of Wales, is agog at the beautiful duchess and her portrait.

“What an ascent for Kitty,” mocks jealous Sir Hugh, “from gutter to Royal ante-chamber.” Just in case we haven’t got the point, the author has Kitty’s French dresser explain, with Ms. Marshall’s inimitable ear for dialect, “
Zere iss only wan ozzer beauty who can compare wis Miss Gordon [Kitty’s unmarried alias] … she’s zee Duchess of Devonshire.”

Kitty finally falls in love with one Brett, Lord Mountford, who as a youth, we are told, sat for Gainsborough’s portrait
The Blue Boy
. Sir Hugh successfully blackmails her and disappears to Constantinople, and Kitty marries Brett, who is, needless to say, “
all man.”

“
I doffed my night robe,” Kitty tells us, “and slipped into the pale wisp of green, the déshabille for the nuptial night.”

And that, mercifully, is that.

Published in the closing months of the war,
Kitty
helped to keep the home fires (and, presumably, loins) burning and went through an astonishing eight printings. This novel is, arguably, one of the worst works of fiction ever written in any language, but Ms. Marshall’s steamy effort gave birth to a film of the same name that remains a classic.
Kitty
, made by Paramount Pictures and directed by Mitchell Leisen, launched the career of Paulette Goddard, in the title role, into the big time. As Goddard’s biographer notes, “
a lot of effort went into the conversion of Paulette from Kitty as eighteenth century Cockney street urchin to a Duchess,” and the American actress was required to “
speak only in a Cockney accent from breakfast to bedtime.” In the hands of scriptwriters Darrell Ware and Karl Tunberg, Ms. Marshall’s bodice-ripper became cleaner, funnier, and a good deal more subtle. Ray Milland plays an attractive and despicable Sir Hugh, and Cecil Kellaway, as Gainsborough, is considerably less excruciating than one might expect. The film was a successful rival to
Forever Amber
from 20th Century Fox, and earned a massive “
$3.5 million in domestic gross rentals” when it opened at the Rivoli Theatre on March 31, 1946. The critics were lavish: “
Paulette Goddard has worked up a blazing temperament to go with her ravishing beauty in the title role … she gives the work the correct touch of wry romanticism.” For publicity stills, Paulette Goddard posed in a vast feathered hat, holding a rose in either hand, in a direct parody of Gainsborough’s original duchess, yet again proving the strange durability of that image.

The story of Kitty, precursor of
My Fair Lady
and a host of other modern Pygmalion tales, is now a familiar one. Whatever Hollywood and Ms. Marshall’s fervid imagination may have done to it in the process, the tale of the poor girl who becomes a great lady through the molding and coaxing of a wicked man she loves is one that the original Kitty would have recognized, and relished.

TWENTY-TWO

Le Brigand International

O
n July 24, 1893,
The Pall Mall Gazette
announced beneath banner headlines the solution to “
A Seventeen years mystery.”

“We are able today to throw some light upon the mystery of the century, and to announce news concerning Gainsborough’s celebrated picture of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the beautiful and witty electioneering duchess to whose fascination Walpole and other contemporary writers paid such lavish tributes,” the article began, before going on to recount the story of the sensational sale, theft, and disappearance of the painting.

“That was many years ago,” the writer continued, “and the fate of the Gainsborough picture threatened to remain for all time as speculative as the identity of the author of the Letters of Junius or the Man in the Iron Mask. But a man in a sackcloth mask has made a revelation about this portrait of the beauteous Georgiana. A prisoner in the Prison de Louvain, wearing the mask which in Belgian gaols is the penal badge, has been interviewed by an emissary of
The Pall Mall Gazette
, to whom the prisoner confessed that it was he who broke into Messrs. Agnew’s on that memorable night and stole the picture … the name of the scoundrel was Adam Wirth. He was none other than the celebrated thief who has earned for himself the proud title of ‘Le Brigand International.’ ”

There is a certain amount of journalistic license here on the part of the
Gazette
. Worth had not exactly confessed; he had been entrapped. The previous May, “
a man named Marsend went to the prison at Louvain armed with an official pass authorising him to see Wirth. The prison authorities took him for a detective.” Worth, on the other hand, assumed Marsend was a solicitor who might help him salvage some of his fortune from the traitor Curtin, and believed his visitor was “
a man of business, merely come to settle some vexed questions between the convict and his wife, who lives in England.” In fact, Marsend appears to have been a freelance journalist of a most dubious kind who had been tipped off to Worth’s past and now hoped to trick the convict into admitting his part in the Gainsborough affair. Marsend was at least partially successful. Worth, starved for company, seems to have been uncharacteristically free with his reminiscences about the Gainsborough theft and other details of his life. Even so, it was rather less than a full “mea culpa,” and the
Gazette
had to admit when Marsend’s story was published that Worth “
has confessed with a certain amount of circumstantiality … and we are not in a position yet to put his confession to the test.”

As Sigismund Cust, M.P., editor of
The Pall Mall Gazette
, later recounted, Marsend and another man had approached him, saying “
they had a clue to the whereabouts of the picture” which they were prepared to sell. They claimed to be working “
in consort” with Agnew’s and also to have obtained the interview with Worth through the Foreign Office. Cust
had given the men some money on account and had promised them more “when they produced the picture,” as they assured him they could. The editor then took out his pen and set to work, turning the information provided by Marsend and his accomplice into publishable material. As Cust later told Agnew’s, “
his principal object in going into this thing was to get what he called ‘copy’ for his journal. But, of course, he would be only too glad if his efforts resulted in our getting back the picture.”

The article concluded with a piece of classic journalistic overstatement: “
Worth has promised, however, to supplement the information already given with further facts, which may enable us at no distant date to say with some confidence whether or not the confession is a genuine one.”

Worth, of course, had promised no such thing, and when the article was published he realized, too late, how he had been snared. The arrest and unmasking of Worth had caused a minor sensation the year before, but the revelation that the man who had posed as Henry Raymond was the man who had stolen the Gainsborough rekindled the story with a vengeance. Mr. Cust of
The Pall Mall Gazette
had done his homework, and while his prose was somewhat overblown, his information was largely accurate, describing in detail most of the crimes perpetrated by Worth over the preceding twenty years, his arrest in Liège, and his current, uncomfortable situation.

“
He made his entry into the world of crime with the boldness of an Alexander who meant to reign in the realms of felony, and to conquer every criminal sphere … he embarked on a sea of extravagance and gaiety, concealing the Gainsborough picture like the man who locks up unquoted shares. Taking an expensive house in Piccadilly, and furnishing it with the taste he had acquired by his frequent visits to the mansions of the wealthy in the practice of his profession as a burglar, he kept his carriage and pair, received much company, and organised nice, cosy little steam launch parties for river picnics, his favourite diversion.”

Why, the author wondered, had Worth refused to part with the valuable Gainsborough? He concluded that Worth had been simply unwilling to take the risk. “A picture of this sort, unlike the swag which the melting pot can instantly render unidentifiable, could not be brought to any market without the risk of immediate detection. The thief thus found himself the possessor of a fortune which he could not realise, an Aladdin’s lamp which he knew not how to employ, a storehouse of wealth to which he could not get the ‘open sesame’!”