XII. Cassie Was a Lady

Nobody- not John D. Rockefeller, nor Samuel Andrews, nor Samuel Mather- was able to build a house that attracted the interest of Cleveland as much as the hip-roofed mansion that sat at 8206 Euclid Avenue during the time when the street was awash with wealthy and, oftentimes, eccentric characters.

The public’s thoughtful attention here had nothing to do with architectural niceties; it was concerned with a woman named Cassie Chadwick, who briefly made it her home. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it her base of operations, for Cassie was more a businesswoman than a homemaker.

Cassie and her husband, Dr. Leroy S. Chadwick, lived just beyond Millionaire’s Row, but in a fine section still that called for something more than an average income. This condition was well met. Dr. Chadwick had a comfortable practice, and Cassie had means of her own, if that is not too much of an understatement to be allowed.

Curious Clevelanders would meet in little groups along the sidewalk in front of the Chadwick home at certain times of the day and they would stand around, pretending to be in earnest conversation, waiting for a chance to see Cassie make one of her grand exits. Cassie did everything with a flourish, even if it was something as humdrum as walking out of her house and getting into her carriage. It was a terribly fancy carriage, of course, and the horses were fine-looking animals, and Cassie herself carried herself with a regal air.

She was friendly enough. Let there be no doubt of that. She would look up and smile at the people staring her way, and the long plumes in her expensive hat would dip in greeting like an admiral’s ensign as she nodded her head toward the onlookers. Everybody agreed that Cassie had a lot of class, but it figured that she would have inherited this much, at least. The science of genetics, which was coming in for a lot of close attention in those days, said as much.

The paint was that Cassie Chadwick had let it be known she was the daughter of Andrew Carnegie, the steel king, and in the new aristocracy of the wealthy that was just building up in the United States, this gave Cassie claim to a place among the nobility. She didn’t walk out on her piazza and holler her claim to the world or anything as crude as that. It was a whispered, ladylike assertion; the kind that is made with just the right hint of color in the cheeks behind a fluttering fan.

Everybody was subtly sympathetic and understanding of her delicate assertion to her rightful place in society because it wouldn’t really have been any kind of sportsmanship to hold her responsible for the awkward fact that Andrew Carnegie was indisputably the world’s leading bachelor. That singular honor necessarily made Cassie an illegitimate daughter, but even a Victorian society was inclined to be tolerant of the peccadillos of the mighty, and such consequences as might spring from same.

Being any kind of relative to the second-richest man in the world was regarded by most enlightened people as an outstanding recommendation for membership in the human race. Thus was society’s usual harsh attitude toward illegitimate children softened considerably in Cassie’s case by the identity of her alleged sire.

There was a good deal of honest astonishment mixed in with the public reaction, naturally, because Andrew Carnegie’s name never had been brushed by any kind of scandal except his scandalous propensity for making money. He was acknowledged to be a moral man of strong religious principles and he had never been identified, certainly, with any kind of intramural footsy.

The story that Carnegie was the father of a middle-aged woman- Mrs. Chadwick was in her forties-was preposterous, but it delighted a good many people, especially those with a strong sense of humor and a lively imagination. And the rumor was readily received by that segment of the people which already was highly suspicions of all millionaires and which already was convinced that men of great wealth, behind their proper public facade, actually were a herd of satyrs.

It is heartening to note that a friendly, charitable view of Cassie’s delicate position was held even by the members of the banking fraternity, a group which has suffered too long from the popular public conception of them as flinty, sniffing Scrooges. Their hearts went out to this gentle lady who had been so cruelly wronged by circumstances, and they saw to it that such large sums of money were available to her as she needed to borrow against the triumphant day when she would come into her rightful inheritance. To say this so cooly, so matter-of-factly, does not do the bankers justice, really, when the fact is that most of them fell over one another in their anxiety to advance her hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is true that in almost every instance the loans carried exorbitant rates of interest, but the thing that convinced the bankers that Cassie was a genuine lady of quality was her refusal to quibble over such details.

For her part, this sensitive woman showed in many genteel ways that she was not unaware of the commendable forbearance of society and the unquestioning generosity of the bankers. She was an appreciative soul, and if, in private, she smote her thigh, the popular way to express pleasure in those days, the circumstances justified this unladylike conduct.

Cassie Chadwick, in fact, bore no relationship whatsoever, legitimate or illegitimate, to Andrew Carnegie. She was the gay deceiver of the Gay Nineties, the leading confidence woman of her day, and one of the best in that specialized field of endeavor in American history.

Her real name, given to her at christening, was Elizabeth Bigley. She was born in 1857 in a small Canadian town, Eastwood, Ontario, one of eight children of an erstwhile farmer and railroad section gang boss, Daniel Bigley, and his wife, Mary Ann.

Nothing really notable occurred in Elizabeth Bigley’s childhood. She was a heavy reader, it is known, and her favorite kind of literature had to do with successful women. Her parents were heard to complain at times that she was a child with entirely too much imagination. Society, years later, would repeat the complaint.

The first suggestion that Elizabeth was not an ordinary teen-ager came when, at age fifteen, she engaged in a little barnyard dalliance with a hot-eyed young farmer who lived nearby. This in itself is not extraordinary or outside the common chronicle of human weakness, but Elizabeth was said to have held off the swain until he had mortgaged his land to purchase her a diamond ring. Touched by this gesture, she then conferred her favors upon him.

This heady experience must have suggested to the girl the fantastic potential for influencing men that is part of every woman’s physiological inheritance and which she explored so thoroughly in later years. Meanwhile, Elizabeth discovered among her other talents a facility for imitative writing which she shortly put to use, writing and mailing a letter to herself over the name of a London, Ontario, attorney. In the letter, she had the fictitious attorney trumpet the glad news that she was heiress to fifteen thousand dollars by the terms of some equally fictitious philanthropist’s will.

Elizabeth promptly had cards printed that announced:

MISS BIGLEY
Heiress to $15,000

She put the cards to effective use one weekend shortly thereafter when she left the family farm for a shopping trip to London. In each shop that she entered, she wrote out checks for amounts larger than the price of her purchase. When the clerks hesitated, Elizabeth flashed her quaintly worded calling card as identification, invariably stirring so much good humor in this manner as to dispel whatever doubts remained in the clerk’s mind.

The checks bounced, of course, and considering the number she had passed so blithely the bank lobby must hive sounded like Wilt Chamberlain dribbling downcourt. She was in her hotel room, packing her bags, when the police arrived the following Monday afternoon. She was taken to the police station where several of the victimized merchants readily identified her as the passer of the bad checks.

Elizabeth was only eighteen years old at the time, and she looked even younger than that tender age. As she stood under the gaze of the glowering police sergeant and the accusing fingers of the merchants, her head dropped upon her chest and her shoulders shook. She was a little, frightened girl suddenly caught doing wrong in a world of towering adults. She was too much for her accusers. They knew she had no money and they had no desire to have her imprisoned. They refused to press charges and she was released with a stern lecture to return home and mend her ways. It was a defeat in a minor skirmish, but it was part of Elizabeth’s education and in that sense valuable. Not that it was a complete defeat, either; the merchants let her take with her the clothes she had purchased with the phony checks.

Four years of the quiet, circumspect life on the farm passed and then the twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth made another journey to the city. This time she went to Toronto, where her first move was to go to a bank and deposit a substantial check made out to her as the basis of a checking account. The check she deposited was one of her own authorship, but it showed she had given some thought to the ways of the financial world. She sallied forth then and swept through the shopping district of Toronto on a buying spree of worthwhile dimensions. The next day she was preparing to carry on with a repeat performance when the police stepped in and called a halt. This time Elizabeth Bigley was arrested and tried.

Her first courtroom experience gave the little farm girl an opportunity to show some of the stuff she was made of. She rolled her eyes in their sockets, simpered, smiled, stared vacantly off into space, and generally conducted herself in such a disarranged style that the judge laid aside the charge on grounds of temporary insanity. Then, no doubt mopping his brow in relief, he sent her trundling back to the family homestead. This time, though, her distracted parents would have none of their strange, troublesome offspring. They dispatched her to the home of a newlywed sister who even then was chirping and thrashing about in her love nest on Franklin Avenue in Cleveland.

Elizabeth by now was a changed girl. She somehow had become more thoughtful as the extent of the gullibility of this world of men became increasingly clear to her. She even changed her name from Elizabeth to Lydia, probably for luck, the way some people throw salt over their left shoulder. Cleveland represented, after all, a new life; at the very least, a new start.

The first thing that Lydia (not Elizabeth) did after takiog up lodging with her sister and her new brother-in-law was to mortgage all the furniture in their house, putting it up as security for loans with which to buy clothing and jewelry. Eventually, of course, this particular piece of perfidy was found out as the creditors began to storm the home bastion, threatening to remove the Morris chair, the ironing board, etc., for Lydia’s failure to pay on her loans. Her sister was aghast, but being a gentle soul, she was willing to forgive and forget. Not her husband, though; he, obviously something of a hothead, tossed Lydia out into the street.

In the months that followed, Lydia moved from one boarding house to another, mortgaging the furniture belonging to the landladies as she went along just to keep in practice. The money thus gained she put to good selfish use, acquiring one of the finest wardrobes in town and a chest full of fine jewelry, all to make herself attractive to men.

The descriptions handed down indicate that while Lydia Bigley was no stunning beauty, neither was she unattractive. Her main feature of beauty was a pair of large, luminous eyes which she could turn on men in a most appealing expression. A number of suitors applied for her hand along the way, but she was selective. Marriage was a serious affair; a stepping-stone to respectability, a better life, and, hopefully, a higher social position. At last those large luminous eyes alighted on a young, up-and-coming doctor named Wallace Springsteen.

The good doctor didn’t have a chance. Not only was he taken by her beauty, but he was gratified to learn that this enchanting creature also was an heiress. Her uncle, she confided, had left her a “large Irish estate.” The doctor, probably envisioning himself riding to the hounds in the months ahead, proposed, and without any further romantic falderal, they were wed.

The record will show many marriages have lasted longer than the one that linked Lydia Bigley to Wallace Springsteen-indeed, theirs lasted only seven days, which really isn’t much of a record at all. On the other hand, very few marriages have hit the rocks as dramatically as theirs did at the end of that first week.

The smashup came about when Dr. Springsteen arrived home after a hard day at the office only to find that he couldn’t even fight his way into the house, there were so many creditors jamming the porch, the hallway, the living room, and even, one presumes, the bedroom. All of them had heard the happy tidings of Lydia’s marriage, and they were there to attach everything the good doctor owned, including his stethoscope and forceps.

A divorce was granted to the doctor three months later. Meanwhile, Lydia had hired some lawyers to collect six thousand dollars she said the doctor had promised to pay her for a separation, and while the divorce trial was pending she borrowed large amounts of money from the lawyers. She came out of the legal tangle without a husband, but considerably richer than when it started, which must be something of a course record in itself.

Something impelled Lydia at this time to leave Cleveland, at least temporarily, and the trail that she left between 1883 and 1886 was a faint one. One researcher, a Plain Dealer reporter named Lawrence J. Hawkins, who later achieved minor prominence as a painter of water colors, traced Lydia to a farm near Youngstown, where she allegedly lived as the wife of a farmer named J. R. Scott. What happened to destroy that marriage is not known.

“Possibly,” mused Hawkins, “she mortgaged his milch cows and was turned out.”

Whatever happened, she returned to Cleveland in 1886, this time wearing the name of Lydia Scott, a name she chose to use only a short while. The boarding house on Superior Avenue in which she found lodging was operated by a Mrs. Hoover, who left the city shortly after Lydia arrived. It wasn’t long before Lydia had assumed the name of Hoover; and at about that time she gave birth to a son.

The birth of the child was the Signal for Mrs. Lydia Hoover to depart Cleveland once again. It is believed she took her little boy to her parents’ farm in Canada, and then traveled on, by herself, to Toledo to begin life anew as a clairvoyant, using the name of “Madame Lydia DeVere.” She did a brisk business as a fortune-teller, but did not confine herself wholly to peering into the future. Once in a while her crystal ball came alive with the romantic notions of her customers to whom she would confide, in post-passionate moments of candor, her “real” identity. Her own talent for assuming different identities came alive at such intervals, and she became, in turn, the daughter of a British general, the widow of an earl, and still another time, the niece of President Ulysses S. Grant. Her lovers seemed to appreciate her all the more for her distinguished lineage and did their utmost, through money gifts, to make her life more bearable.

Eventually, Madame Lydia met a young, naive Toledoan named Joseph Lamb, an expressman, who found her irresistible. One of the lures that drew him close to her was her appreciation of the better things in life. The poor Lamb liked nothing better than an occasional session of fun and culture in the parlor of the enchantress. When their passion was spent, they would take turns reading poetry, and that was proof enough for him that he had found an extraordinary woman, as indeed he had.

For her part, Madame Lydia had been studying Lamb and finally hit on a scheme to use him in a fleecing game. What else? She gave him a worthless note for several thousand dollars, signed by a “prominent Clevelander,” and persuaded him to cash it for her at a friendly neighborhood bank. He completed this mission so successfully that she drew up another note for him to cash, and still another, and it might have become a regular routine had not the police stepped in. When they totted up the amount that the madame had bilked from the banks, it came to the neighborhood of forty thousand dollars.

Lamb was no help to Lydia at the trial. He bleated freely and expressively, describing not only how he had trustingly served as the instrument of the fortune-teller in trotting back and forth between the countinghouse and the joyhouse, but he also described in a simple, direct statement the details of his love affair with Madame Lydia which left no doubt in the minds of the jurors who was the seducer and who was the seducee.

A happy, faraway look came onto Joe’s face as he recalled the happy hours he had whiled away in Madame Lydia’s parlor, and his voice strengthened and took on a proud ring as he recalled the poetry readings. In response to questions by counsel, he attributed to Madame Lydia a “strange magnetic power” that made him obey her wishes. The jurors nodded understandingly and acquitted him on grounds of “hypnotic influence,” sentencing Madame Lydia, at the same time, to nine years in the Ohio Penitentiary.

The two years that Elizabeth Lydia Bigley Springsteen Scott Hoover DeVere spent in the pen in Columbus constituted something of a turning point period. They gave her the time she needed for quiet recollection of all that had happened in the previous years and an opportunity to judge herself. When the period of introspection had ended, she wrote some letters to the parole board, pleading for a chance to start life anew, and the board acceded to her request. Governor William McKinley signed her parole papers just before Christmas 1893.

So it came about that a proper, quietly attractive widow named Cassie L. Hoover took up residence in Cleveland at that time, and wherever she went, there were nods of approval. She was a nice lady at a time when nice ladies were held in highest esteem by society. Among those who came to admire her the most was a quiet, lonely widower, the respectable Dr. Leroy S. Chadwick, who lived with an ailing mother and an ailing sister. His twenty-one-year-old daughter, Mary, attended an eastern boarding school.

How he and Cassie became acquainted is not known, but the route which their friendship followed to true love was an unusual one. The doctor told Cassie one night about the occasional twinges of rheumatism with which he was afflicted, and she, all compassion, clucked and volunteered to give him a massage treatment. The rubdown must have helped considerably because it wasn’t any time at all before the doctor was proposing marriage and being accepted. They were secretly married in Pittsburgh, which seems to be carrying romance rather far, but no matter. Mrs. Cassie Chadwick now had achieved the respectability for which she had hankered so long, and she was about to take her place among the prominent people who had brought Euclid Avenue to a place of such esteem in the nation.

The Chadwick residence was a two-story red brick house with a wooden porch, held up by white pillars, running across its entire width. It had a hip roof topped by a lookout room, or conning tower. It was not the prettiest, or most imposing house on Euclid Avenue, but it was respectable, and that counted heavily in its favor. The interior decoration of the home was attuned to this same somber propriety, or, as one thoughtful looker-on has described it, “chaste dignity.” It was, apparently, much too chaste and much too dignified for Cassie’s liking, so she arranged a little surprise for her groom.

On Christmas Eve, no less, Cassie took Leroy to a theater party. While they were thus engaged, an army of moving men and decorators rolled up to the sedate mansion and took it over in a fury of activity. By the time the Chadwicks returned, it was no place like home; not the home they had left only a few hours before, anyway, and not like any home that Euclid Avenue ever had seen before, likely.

Every stick of furniture was brand, spanking new. In place of the comfortable old dark pieces with their delicate antimacassar accessories and the frowning portraits of gaunt Chadwickian ancestors, all was gaiety. The prevailing color in the new scheme of things was gold. Lush new Persian rugs now covered the floor, and the dull plush furniture had been replaced by tables and chairs with hand-painted designs, elegantly tooled leather, and artistically carved Circassian walnut cabinets. Dr. Chadwick himself was a pretty hue somewhere between fuchsia and lime green as he groped for his dangling pince-nez and tottered about in aimless shock.

Cassie, now completely taken with the joys of housekeeping, was only beginning. In the weeks and months that followed, she added a lot of little items to make the place seem even more cozy and homelike. She found, for example, a green glass sofa tinted pink and shaped like a seashell, a really rare strike that was, if uncomfortable, a pip of a conversation piece. There was a musical chair that blared out loudly whenever anybody sat on it, and it must have been great fun to watch surprised guests trying to claw their way up the wall after they had vaulted from the trick seat. Beautiful vases were everywhere, on tables, ledges, and even on the floor, while pictures of three-dimensional peacocks and moody maids sniffing flowers covered the wallpaper, one frame touching the next. The centerpiece on a library table in the drawing room was a tall, glass-domed perpetual motion clock, and no matter where one went in the big house, he could not escape the timber-shaking tones of the nine-thousand-dollar pipe organ that Cassie had installed in the small music room.

Now, at last, the sedate old Chadwick mansion was a house to conjure with, as was its mistress. She, as a matter of fact, was ready to undertake her master work of conjuration, and toward that end, she invited a young, but prominent, Cleveland attorney to accompany her to New York City so as to be available should she need his professional advice. She had studied her man carefully, and she knew he was the kind of person incapable of keeping a confidence; in a word, a blabbermouth.

Once in New York, Mrs. Chadwick hailed a hansom and called out an address. The cabbie’s route was along Fifth Avenue, and as they were trotting along near 59th Street, Mrs. Chadwick suddenly ordered the driver to halt. She excused herself to the lawyer, promised to return within minutes, and left the carriage to enter a nearby mansion.

The lawyer was startled because the house she had entered was that of the great Andrew Carnegie. The trip to New York had been mystifying enough at the beginning, but this new move heaped mystery upon mystery.

Inside the mansion, Cassie’s conversation with the butler did not seem at all mysterious. She had identified herself and explained that she was in New York interviewing applicants for a domestic position in her Cleveland household and that one of the job-seekers had claimed previous experience working for Carnegie. She was simply checking on the girl’s references.

The Carnegie butler, while properly deferential to this lady of obvious breeding, was horrified that anybody should have taken such liberties with the Carnegie name. The person, he sniffed, never had been employed in that household and the good lady from Cleveland would be well advised to avoid a scamp of that type.

Cassie thanked the butler and as she departed, she pulled out a large brown envelope from underneath her coat. She came out to the carriage holding the envelope in such a way as to make it conspicuous.

The young Cleveland lawyer was spellbound by this time, and losing the reticence which is the nature of good attorneys everywhere, he admitted his great curiosity over Cassie’s visit to the Carnegie house.

Cassie blushed and tried to wag him off, but the lawyer persisted with his entreaties for an explanation and she, giving all the signs of a reluctant girl arriving at one of the great decisions of her life, finally yielded.

“I must tell somebody sometime, I suppose,” she sighed, “but you, in turn, must swear eternal secrecy.”

“Oh, I do, I do!” babbled the lawyer, beside himself with curiosity.

Cassie searched his face and nodded as if satisfied that she at last had found a worthy confidant. Then she told her story, speaking with downcast eyes, as she revealed that she was the daughter of Andrew Carnegie. Ignoring the gurgling sounds from the throat of the lawyer, she lifted her head bravely and with her large luminous eyes slightly misty, she told how Carnegie really loved her mother, but had not married her because of his deep attachment to his own mother.

“Good God!” exclaimed the lawyer, trying to comprehend the overwhelming news.

“I don’t even know who my mother is,” Cassie continued, sadder than ever.

“Terrible! Terrible!” barked the lawyer. “Everybody has a right to know their own mother!” On the other hand, he added, the situation could be a lot worse. At least Cassie knew her own father. But did her own father acknowledge her as his own daughter?

“Ob, yes,” said Cassie. “Father is very kind. And very generous.”

With that, she handed the brown envelope to the lawyer. In it, among other papers, were two notes. One said: “One year after date, I promise to pay to Cassie L. Chadwick $250,000, with interest at live per cent.” The note, which carried the large signature of “Andrew Carnegie,” was dated January 7, 1904, almost two years in the future. The other note was similar to the first except that it carried the amount of $500,000. It, too, had the multimillionaire’s signature.

In addition to those financial goodies, Cassie confided, the envelope contained securities in the value of live million dollars. The hitch was, however, that she could not cash in the securities until several years had passed, orders of Big Daddy.

The lawyer returned to Cleveland several days ahead of Cassie-she wanted to do a bit of shopping-and it was just as she had expected. His performance in those few days still rates as the most spectacular breach of confidence in the city’s history. By the time Cassie got back to town, everybody, even the comer newsboys and the shoeblacks, knew of her secret. The lawyer was just a blur as he shot from street to street, spilling the beans wherever he went.

Cassie’s followup to this sterling performance was a visit to the staid Wade Park Bank, where she handed over her brown package for safekeeping. She didn’t have to tell the treasurer, a respected banker named Iri Reynolds, a thing. The lawyer had done his work well. Every banker in town was hoping Cassie would drop in. Reynolds took her package and without opening it, he gravely wrote her the following receipt:

“I hereby certify that I have in my possession $5,000,000 in securities belonging to Mrs. Cassie L. Chadwick, and that neither myself nor the Wade Park Bank nor any other person has any claim upon the same. Iri Reynolds.”

This was the cornerstone on which Cassie Chadwick would build the most fantastic of swindles-a long series of loans pressed on her by bankers in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, Oberlin, and New York totaling, it is believed, about $2,000,000, give or take a hundred here or a grand there. With Iri Reynolds’ receipt in her possession, tapping wealthy men and institutions for loans was so simple as to be embarrassing. She not only used the receipt, she used influential people, and bent them to her purpose.

One such unwitting tool here was John D. Rockefeller’s pastor, Rev. Charles Eaton of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, whose congregation she had joined upon her marriage to Dr. Chadwick. Cassie confided the secret of her financial dilemma and Carnegie relationship to him, and he, a gracious soul, was thoughtful enough to help her by passing along word to his brother, a Boston lawyer, John Eaton.

Shortly thereafter, Cassie received an invitation to confer with Herbert D. Newton, a Boston investment banker. The conference was eminently satisfactory. He gave Cassie a check for $79,000 and his own note for $50,000. In return, all she had to do was sign a promissory note for $190,000, being careful not to raise her eyebrows over the amount of interest she was being charged.

Back home again, she found her way to the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin, where President Charles T. Beckwith and Cashier A. B. Spear fell all over themselves lending her money, first handing her $102,000 out of their own pockets, and then $700,000 of the bank’s funds. A Pittsburgh steel executive gave her $800,000; The Savings & Deposit Bank of Elyria, $10,000; Oberlin College, $75,000, and The First National Bank of Conneaut, $25,000.

So it went, on and on, with nobody, even at this late date, fully informed on the number of loans she engineered or the exact sum of money she mulcted out of banks and individuals. But with $2,000,000 as a round figure estimate, Cassie earned her place in history. What she did with all that money was, from a spectator’s viewpoint, more interesting even than the way she got it. Cassie, as a spender, was the female counterpart of Diamond Jim Brady except that she was even flashier. Money, to her, was for the spending.

One day, as Cassie was strolling through a downtown store, her eyes alighted on a handsome grand piano.

“I’ll take it,” she said to a clerk. Then, laying a restraining arm on the clerk, she added: “How many pianos do you have like this one?”

“Twenty-seven; replied the clerk, after lifting his eyes and doing some lightning mental arithmetic.

“Fine,” said Cassie. “I’ll take all twenty-seven of them. They’ll make nice gifts for some of my friends.”

Another time she chartered a train to take a party of her favorite people to New York City for a weekend of fun and theatergoing.

Nobody ever could accuse Cassie of sitting on her money. Nor could anybody attend a dinner party at her house without finding an expensive gift under the napkin. Once she took four young ladies from Cleveland with her on a tour of Europe and paid all their expenses.

Sometimes, of course, her generosity boomeranged on her, as it did when her own cook, upon whom she had lavished much money and fine clothes, including a sable wrap, quit her job in the Chadwick household because it was beneath her station.

She was not the only person to reject Cassie. Cleveland society took a very dim view of her gauche efforts to impress them and generally turned its back on her. But Dr. Chadwick had friends in society and sometimes for his sake, more often out of curiosity’s sake, they would attend parties at the Chadwick mansion. They had a great time comparing notes later and regaling the inner circle with firsthand stories of their fantastic hostess.

“Oh, the contrast between Mrs. Chadwick and the other women,” exclaimed one gentleman guest after a party, “I’m sure it was apparent to the doctor. He seemed laboring under a constraint all evening.

“If the rooms were almost barbaric in their adornments, Mrs. Chadwick was quite so. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, was piled high and glistened with diamonds. A double necklace of diamonds circled her full throat. There were diamonds on her shoulders and diamonds on the front of her dress. She struck me as being a handsome woman then, though at other times I thought her plain.

“The most remarkable thing about her was her eyes. They were brown, I think, though when I looked in them I was at once filled with such a feeling of strange excitement I cannot swear to the color.”

Those large, luminous eyes again!

The house of cards could not stand for long, and it was the Boston banker, Newton, who toppled it. Unable to get any satisfaction from Cassie on the amount owed to him, Newton brought suit in Federal Court in Cleveland on November 22, 1904, for $190,800. The suit also asked that Iri Reynolds of the Wade Park Bank be restrained from disposing of the $7,500,000 it was presumed he held in trust.

All of Cassie’s creditors got a nervous spasm when they heard of the suit. Panic is a close relative of high finance, and it was almost a classical Pavlovian reaction when two other bankers jumped into court with their own suits against Cassie, seeking to collect on notes that totaled $67,039.

Now the panic really was on, and it struck immediately at the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin, which closed its doors while the officers took inventory of the situation. The president of the institution, C. T. Beckwith, a sixty-five-year-old man, took to his bed, ill, after revealing he had given Cassie $240,000 in loans, four times the capital stock of the bank-in addition to $102,000 of his own money.

Cassie’s note for $500,000 backing up these loans, explained Beckwith, were indorsed by a man “who can pay it as easily as you or I could pay a nickel,” but he refused to divulge to the directors the name of the man. Mr. Beckwith was not only a banker; he was a gentleman.

“I can’t tell you, I can’t,” he cried out. “If I lose home, honor, reputation, everything, I must keep locked in my own breast this one secret. I am bound by an oath I cannot break.”

Banker Newton also held a $500,000 note. Like Banker Beckwith, he refused to identify the signer. But Banker Newton’s attorneys were not hampered by the rules of the banking business. They announced that the signer of the note was Andrew Carnegie.

Now, at last, the big name in the game was in the open for the first time, and reporters called on the steel king for a statement. He replied with a typical Scottish economy of words.

“I know nothing of the woman,” said Andrew Carnegie.

Cassie, who had been staying in the old Holland House in New York while she engaged in one of her periodic shopping sprees, suddenly checked out. Rumors that she had committed suicide began to circulate.

Dr. Chadwick and his daughter, cognizant, perhaps, of the impending disaster, embarked for Europe.

Banker lri Reynolds of the Wade Park Bank was ordered to bring the brown package containing Cassie’s $7,500,000 worth of securities into court and to open the package. He complied with the order, and when it became clear that all it contained were worthless securities, he sat down and cried. The judge gently asked him how much of his own money he had loaned Cassie, but Reynolds asked to be excused from answering the question, and it was dropped.

Cassie was arrested, a week later, in the Hotel Breslin in New York. The arresting officer took one look at her large luminous eyes and it immediately became a question as to who was the captor and who was the captive.

“The kindest, gentlest face one would ever want to see,” the cop told reporters. “Just such a face as you or I would like to see in our families.”

Cassie herself addressed herself more closely to the issue at hand in her statement:

“Public clamor has made me a sacrifice,” she said. “Here I am, an innocent woman hounded into jail, while a score of the biggest business men in Cleveland would leave town tomorrow if I told all I know. Yes, I borrowed money, but what of it? I will even admit I did not borrow in a business-like way. I wish now I had followed old rules a little closer. But you can’t accuse a poor business woman of being a criminal, can you?”

A train of tragic events followed. Banker Beckwith, laid low with a heart attack suffered at the time his bank failed, had a relapse which doctors called “paralytic dementia,” caused by worry, and finally shot himself to death in February 1905.

The cashier of the bank, A. B. Spear, was indicted for conspiracy with Beckwith and Cassie. He pleaded guilty, served five years of a seven-year sentence, was pardoned, and died in Detroit soon after.

Cassie herself went On trial on March 6, 1905, in the courtroom of Federal Judge R. W. Taylor, who had to fight his way through the crowds surrounding his chambers with the help of deputy marshals. Among the spectators in the courtroom was Andrew Carnegie himself. He stared with frank interest at the woman who had claimed to be his daughter and who had used his name so loosely, but effectively. He did not speak to her, however, nor did she attempt to speak to him.

Somebody asked Carnegie if he were going to prosecute Mrs. Chadwick himself and his reply was: ’Why should I? Wouldn’t you be proud at the fact that your name is good for loans of $1,250,000, even when somebody else signs it? It is glory enough for me that my name is good, even when I don’t sign it. Mrs. Chadwick has shown that my credit is A-1.”

The trial lasted six days, and at the end, Mrs. Chadwick’s attorney, Jay P. Dawley, made his speech to the jury:

“Here on this beautiful spring morning, when the very elements seem to be arguing with more than mortal eloquence on this woman’s behalf, survey the pitiful scene before you.

“A woman stands alone on one side and arrayed against her are all the forces of the great, the powerful, the magnificent United States government, the strongest, the mightiest and the most feared government in the world-and this tremendous crushing power stands as the accuser of this one weak woman…”

The United States district attorney, John J. Sullivan, was equally eloquent when it came his tum to address the jury. One reporter wrote that Sullivan “beat on the table with his fist and shouted till the rafters rang.” In his plea, he said:

“I shall not do violence to your intelligence. I have studied you, but if I knew human nature as well as she I would know you all. Perhaps the charm of Cassie Chadwick over men has not ceased. Perhaps the seduction of her smile, the music of her voice, the witchery of her eyes- these things of the enchantress- are with her still to influence some of you. I only hope you are beyond the power of this Duchess of Diamonds, this peeress of criminality.

“I say that you have before you a crime which for conspicuousness, magnitude and danger was never exceeded in the annals of the country. You have before you the most dangerous criminal in the world today!”

The jury deliberated for five hours and most of the spectators had wearied and gone home when the moment of the verdict came. Cassie sat stolidly at the trial table, her son seated alongside her, and when the verdict of guilty was announced, he put his arms around his mother’s neck and whispered into her ear.

The Plain Dealer account of her reaction said:

“A spasm of pain crossed her face, her head gradually fell forward and for a moment she was silent. It was as though the blow had crushed her completely. A few tears welled from her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She put her handkerchief before her face to stop the sudden flow, but it was useless. Her weeping grew until she was sobbing like a child.”

She was sentenced to ten years in the Ohio Penitentiary, but the most telling sign of her complete defeat was that this woman who had borrowed millions of dollars through the years was unable to raise bond pending appeal. She began serving her sentence immediately.

Her career as a prisoner was brief. She was reserved, aloof-some said surly. When the master magician, Harry Houdini, did a benefit performance for the prisoners, she refused to attend; she who had worked so much magic herself. When she talked, as she occasionally did, her speech was full of allusions to a mysterious “trust” fund, which, she said, would be revealed when the time was right.

But time ran out on Cassie Chadwick on October 10, 1907, only 2 1/2 years after she had entered prison. Her death moved one prominent Cleveland banker to wonder aloud:

“What do you suppose she could have done to us if she had had an education?”