XVIII. The Victory of Laura Corrigan

Cleveland’s social register is a book that does not open readily to new entries. The names already inscribed in classical script on its vellum pages are kept free of vitiating, deleterious influences from the outside by hasp and lock, and the keepers of the keys are vigilant, anxious guardians. Over the ramparts of Bratenahl, Gates Mills, Hunting Valley, Waite Hill, and Pepper Pike they watch- ready to challenge any wayfarer who approaches too close.

One who made the game approach was a former Wisconsin milkmaid named Laura Mae Whitlock McMartin Corrigan, and her memory is still green, not only in Cleveland society circles but among the Right People of two continents.

Laura deserves a place in history with such enduring notables as One-Eyed Connolly, the gate-crasher, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Cleveland society denied her entrance and repulsed her overtures, as did New York society, but Laura was a fighter and a tactician. She succeeded over all to become the reigning international hostess of the 1920s and the 1930s; the Elsa Maxwell and Perle Mesta of continental society; the friend of the rich and the royal.

The way up to that dizzy social pinnacle was not easy.

Somebody once dubbed Laura Corrigan “the Flagpole Kelly of Social Climbers.” But she found that somebody had greased the flagpole when she arrived in Cleveland as the bride of young Jimmy Corrigan in 1917. He was one of the city’s leading playboys, no mean distinction in a day when playboys were numerous and the competition among them for honors was spirited.

Her arrival in Cleveland was gaudily arranged by her generous groom, who saw to it that she roared into town in a fifteen-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce, allegedly of lavender hue, driven by the former chauffeur of Jay Gould and accompanied by a liveried footman. The car whisked her and her retinue to the sprawling country home of the Corrigan family, an estate called Nagirroc in Wickliffe, which today is the home of the Pine Ridge Country Club.

It seems only fair to point out that Nagirroc spelled backward is Corrigan, and vice versa. The Serutan people may as well be good sports and face up to the fact that the Corrigans were spelling things backward long before they were.

There was no noticeable ripple of excitement among the members of Cleveland society upon the arrival of the young honeymooners in their midst; no gay round of parties to welcome Laura to the inside circle. The general reaction could be described as a frosty indifference that concealed real hostility. As Laura and Jimmy quickly learned, the snub was on. There were tentative bids for Jimmy’s company at some minor social functions, but his new wife was steadfastly ignored. A lot of Jimmy’s old friends felt badly about giving him the pass-by, sometimes known as the old social shuffle, but, dammit, why did he have to go and marry the girl?

They remembered, fondly, the time when the old Jimmy had had that affair with the Pittsburgh girl- wasn’t her name Georgiana Young?- and she had sued him for fifty thousand dollars for breach of promise. The case had traveled through two courts and Jimmy had won the verdict in both, but only after some lively testimony, allegations, charges, and countercharges. Jimmy’s lawyer had summed it up rather neatly when he had turned to the court, arms outspread, palms turned upward, and announced that his client was guilty of nothing more serious than sowing his wild oats.

Many of his old Cleveland friends liked to think that that was the real Jimmy; not the fellow who had gone off and married a girl whose only recommendation, apparently, was her feminine charm.

Laura’s background, certainly, was not prepossessing. Some accounts say she was the daughter of a Wisconsin lumberjack; others identify him as a Wisconsin gardener. It wasn’t much of a choice, from a social standpoint. But there is no question at all that Laura Mae Whitlock was an ambitious girl, anxious to rise above her station and make her mark in the world. She went from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to Chicago to work as a waitress, but not for long. She met and married the house doctor at a Chicago hotel, a Dr. Duncan R. McMartin. It was a large step forward, becoming the wife of a doctor of medicine, and most women would have settled for this achievement. Perhaps Laura also would have accepted the life of quiet domesticity if she had not met Captain James Corrigan of Cleveland, a wealthy steel magnate; head of the Corrigan, McKinney Steel Company, which later became an integral unit in the formation of the Republic Steel Corporation. Captain Corrigan was the father of the noted playboy, Jimmy, and he himself was a rousing, outgoing sort. He had once been a partner of Frank Rockefeller in some speculative investments in iron are property in the Lake Superior district. Along the way he had borrowed money from John D. Rockefeller, Frank’s brother. It was John D.’s treatment of Captain Corrigan in their financial dealings that presumably caused a permanent rift in relations between Frank and John Rockefeller. Captain Corrigan sued John D., claiming deception, but the courts upheld Rockefeller.

Captain Corrigan went on to found the steel company, with the financial assistance of Judge Stevenson Burke and Price McKinney. The company prospered and grew extravagantly, but a terrible tragedy fell upon the Corrigan family before the new century was seven months old. In July 1900 Captain James Corrigan and his brother, Captain John Corrigan, took their families on a Lake Erie vacation trip aboard James’ yacht, the Idler, which was said to be the finest sailing craft of its kind on the Great Lakes. Just the previous winter he had spent eight thousand dollars on the yacht to keep it shipshape.

Aboard the Idler were Mrs. Ida Corrigan, fifty-two, wife of James; Mrs. Jennette Corrigan Rieley, twenty-four, their daughter and wife of Charles F. Rieley of New Brunswick, New Jersey; two other daughters, Miss Ida Corrigan, fifteen, and Miss Jane Corrigan, twenty; Mary Corrigan Rieley, one-year-old infant daughter of the Rieleys; Mrs. Mary Corrigan, wife of Captain John; the captain of the yacht, Charles G. Holmes, and a crew of eight.

The trip hardly had gotten under way when word came that Captains John and James Corrigan were needed back in Cleveland to attend to an urgent business transaction. They got off the yacht at Port Huron, some thirty-five miles west of Cleveland, and returned by train, leaving orders for the yacht to be towed back to home port by a steamship, the Australia.

Lake Erie’s shallow waters grew choppy as the Idler was being towed toward Cleveland on the morning of July 8, and some of the passengers got seasick. Mrs. James Corrigan, it was said later, asked that the captain detach the tow line and sail the ship independently for a smoother ride. Another account states that breaking the tow line was Captain Holmes’ own idea. The action, at any rate, was taken.

A hot sun blazed down on the yacht at high noon as she cut through the rough lake, driving the members of the two Corrigan families below deck. Then, suddenly, black clouds moved in and the wind rose. Lake Erie is notorious for its sudden squalls that can whip its waters into a fury in a matter of minutes, and this was one of the worst. There was terror among the passengers huddled below, and there was a frenzy of activity among the sailors as they tried to take down the sails before the big blow hit in its full strength.

There wasn’t time. The Idler’s foresail, mainsail, and jib were still up when sudden sixty-mile-an”hour winds tore away the foregaff, even as the sailors slashed away with their knives in a futile attempt to cut the halyards. The graceful yacht staggered under the blow and yawed wildly before she surrendered to the force of the gale by rolling over in the water. She capsized only sixteen miles from home port, close to the cliffs that line the water’s edge on the western shoreline of Cleveland. Two fishing tugs were at the scene within twenty minutes, but their rescue efforts were Dot enough to prevent a tragic toll. They could save only the life-jacketed members of the crew and Mrs. John Corrigan. She-the only passenger to survive-was clinging in a state of shock to a cork-filled sofa.

Captain James Corrigan lost his wife, three young daughters, and his infant granddaughter in that Lake Erie tragedy. The only member of his immediate family left to him was his son, James, Jr.

The yacht righted itself the following day, but it was almost plucked apart by souvenir hunters who rowed out to the disabled craft. Captain Corrigan afterward brought formal charges of negligence against Captain Holmes, and the master of the ill-fated boat was arrested and tried. His sailors gave strong testimony in his behalf, however, and he was exonerated.

There are conflicting stories as to the time and place of Captain Corrigan’s meeting with Mrs. Laura McMartin of Chicago. One version has it that shortly after the lake tragedy, the captain, with his brother John and his wife, went to White Sulphur Springs to recuperate and that he met Mrs. McMartin at the resort. It was said that they hit it off at once; that Mrs. McMartin not only was attractive, but that she turned a warm, sympathetic personality toward Captain Corrigan in his troubled time. At the end of the Corrigan party’s stay, she was invited by the captain to visit Nagirroc soon and she promised she would.

Another story has it that it was Captain Corrigan’s former sister-in-law, Mrs. X. Z. Scott, who went to the resort and took a liking to Laura McMartin, and that it was her invitation that brought the Chicago femme fatale to Cleveland and the fateful meeting with the lonely captain.

In any event, there is no disputing that Laura did pop up at the old Corrigan homestead in Wickliffe, and there is reliable testimony that she and Captain Corrigan became great and good friends.

During the seven or eight years that this December-and-May friendship flourished, young Jimmy Corrigan was leading the shadowy life of the prodigal son. The breach-of-promise suit against him by the Pittsburgh girl had brought his father’s displeasure to the boiling point and Jimmy, a graduate of Case School of Applied Science, left the old family homestead to try to make his way out West. He did some field work in the western mining country for a New York company, managed a telegraph office at Goldfield, Nevada, and eventually made his way to San Francisco where, among other things, he worked as a bartender.

It was there that Price McKinney, a friend of the family, found Jimmy. He had had news to convey to him. Old and ailing Captain Corrigan had drawn up a will disinheriting his son and, it is said, substituting as his heirs the children of Price McKinney. But McKinney was said to have persuaded young Jimmy to return home and make his peace with his father before it was too late. The junior Corrigan effected the reconciliation and took up life again in Cleveland.

Strangely, even though Captain Carrigan was something of a swinger himself, he had openly disapproved of the way in which his son liked to lark about. He approved of fun as a pastime, but saw no future in it as a full-time career. He continued to be skeptical of Jimmy’s ability to adjust to the problems of a man’s estate even after the reconciliation. His skepticism was evident in the will he left behind at his death in 1915. He bequeathed his estate to the son, but placed its administration in the hands of two trustees, Price McKinney and James E. Ferris (another friend and business associate), until James, Jr., had reached the age of forty. At that time the future responsibility of the estate would be determined by McKinney, who would have to decide whether the son could be trusted with the fortune.

Laura McMartin came to Cleveland for the funeral and met the son of her old, departed friend. Their acquaintanceship quickly ripened into a much more significant association and short, gasping noises came from behind the fluttering fans in the drawing rooms of Cleveland Society. Whatever Jimmy Corrigan’s thoughts were about the trustee arrangement set up for him by his late father, they were subordinate to the grand passion he felt for Mrs. McMartin. She by now had divorced her Chicago doctor, and even while Jimmy’s friends clucked and society wagged its head in vigorous disapproval, the romance flourished in rather scandalous disregard for the proprieties of the day. Their marriage in 1917, instead of stilling the tongues of outraged members of society, stirred indignation to new heights.

It was quickly apparent that the doors had been closed to Jimmy Corrigan and his bride, his senior by seven years, but Laura did not crumple into a rocker and become a Nagirroc recluse. Life in the Cleveland deep freeze was not for her, and she refused to accept meekly the brush-off from society. After a determined effort to crash through the social stockade, she finally gave up on Cleveland. She had been roundly defeated in the battle, but there still was a war to be won and she was determined to win it. She and her husband moved to New York City to resume the fight on a new and larger battleground, one that gave her more room for maneuvering. She plunged back into the fray, feathered plumes flying and diamonds aglitter; presumably hopeful of victory.

Laura would not have been optimistic about the outcome if she had been better acquainted with the interrelated mechanism of American society. In that case she would have known that there are strong links that bind the inner set of Cleveland with the haughty set in other cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis; perhaps even Gallipolis. There are days when the skies between these cities are dark with passenger pigeons winging back and forth carrying coded messages identifying the undesirables. One of the pigeons must have carried a red-hot dossier on Laura Corrigan, judging from the way New York Society braced itself and took its position shoulder-to-shoulder with Cleveland society in opposition to her; two cold shoulders united to fend off a single interloper.

Laura spent a small fortune trying to buy her way into the Manhattan register, but without success. It is entirely to her credit that she did not falter or crumple as it became painfully clear that she had been rejected again. She accepted her second major rebuff without a whimper, ordered the family bags packed again, and in 1921 the Corrigans took off for London and still another running jump at the big goal.

Mrs. Corrigan, clearly, was a persistent woman. Once she had set up her residence in the new locale, her persistence and willingness to plunge steeply paid off handsomely. She rented the Grosvenor Street mansion of Mrs. George Keppel, once a favorite hostess of King Edward VII, and with it a household staff that was one of the largest and most skilled in the United Kingdom, outside of the royal establishments. Mrs. Keppel herself gave Laura’s campaign to establish herself in society tremendous impetus with her seasoned advice and introductions to the right people. It wasn’t long before Laura’s clambakes were the talk of London and Paris. Her dinners were the most fulsome repasts that could be brought together on one table, and all her parties radiated class- not to mention class distinction. When Lama served rare roast beef, it had better bleed blue.

There were a number of good, sound reasons why the social climber from Cleveland, Ohio, should have been so cordially received by international society. It would be foolhardy not to count among these the wealth that flowed her way from the counting rooms of the Corrigan, McKinney Steel Company. But Laura’s willingness to spend that money to achieve the right effect was equally important. So was her determination to fetch the best people- absolutely the best people- to her festive board and ill’awing room. Just as money is said to beget money, good company will beget good company.

A possibility that cannot be overlooked is that many of the titled guests who condescended to be entertained by the American hostess were engaging in a bit of social slumming. Sometimes their motive was just plain avarice. Laura was both eccentric and generous. There was always a jeweled gift of some kind next to the napkin at each setting, usually a gold cigarette case for the ladies and gold garters for the men or something equally rare and desirable. At any rate, the lavish scale of her parties did have the effect of setting the haut monde back on its clicking heels, and invitations to Laura Corrigan parties soon became part of the accepted scheme of things among the people who counted on the Tight Little Island- including, of course, certain members of the Royal Family.

Even as England was buzzing with amusement-and a little resentment- over the audacity of the lady from Cleveland, some social cutups decided to have a bit of malicious fun. They sent out engraved invitations to a Laura Corrigan party to a select list of people. There was a notation on each of the invitations that the Prince of Wales would be among the honored guests.

When one of those invitations was shown to the prince, he reacted in a way that did him credit. He spotted it immediately as a monstrous kind of joke and upset its calculated effect of embarrassing Mrs. Corrigan by showing up for her party, thereby giving the social stock of the American hostess a tremendous boost. The middle-aged woman from the Wisconsin farmlands who could not make the social grade in Cleveland or in New York was rolling at last and was well on her way to becoming a pacesetter of the smart set in London and in Paris as she shuttled back and forth between the two cities, with occasional side ventures to the Mediterranean, in one of the most impressive demonstrations ever given of the fine art of partying high society.

Once in a while, it is true, Mrs. Corrigan flubbed one, but she was a quick learner and usually overrode her mistakes with a burst of generosity that shortly brought any injured acquaintances back within her orbit in a mood of total forgiveness. It is generally conceded that she pulled her biggest rock when she upstaged two members of Parliament who had been brought to one of Laura’s parties by Mrs. Cunningham-Reid, a sister of Lady Louis Mountbatten, by completely ignoring their uninvited presence. Unfortunately for her, the victims of her icy indifference were friends of Prince George, and that royal gentleman was so offended by the incident that he refused to attend a dinner party to which Mrs. Corrigan earlier had invited him.

Laura’s faux pas did not cause a lasting rift with Prince George; he was among the titled elite who favored her with his company throughout her career, as did King Alfonso XIII of Spain, Princess Marina of Greece, Princess Mary of England, the Duke and Duchess of York, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and many other members of Europe’s reigning families.

As might have been expected, Mrs. Corrigan did not regard Americans as her favorite people, and those of her fellow countrymen who won admission to her list of party regulars always found themselves to be a small minority at any gala. One of those regulars was another expatriate, the Countess von Haugwitz-Reventlow, the former Barbara Hutton.

Even as life moved along smoothly and victoriously in England and On the Continent for the Corrigans, Laura and Jimmy still had the annoyance of unresolved and unsolved problems back home in Cleveland. The life of an international society hostess is one that exerts severe pressures on the old bankroll, and Laura, a practical woman at times, realized that if she were to mount the social summit, as it seemed she would, it could be done only with the help of an unlimited checking account.

With Price McKinney and James Ferris in their roles as trustees of Jimmy Corrigan’s inherited estate, Mr. and Mrs. Corrigan were not free to do the things they wanted. McKinney, furthermore, had indicated his disapproval of Jimmy’s marriage to Laura by dropping the Corrigan name out of the title of the great steel company in Cleveland, changing it from Corrigan, McKinney Steel Company to the McKinney Steel Company.

Court action was instituted by Jimmy to gain control of his inheritance. He charged in a suit heard in the Lake County courthouse in Painesville, just east of Cleveland, that McKinney was trying to “squeeze” him out of authority in the affairs of the McKinney Steel Company, citing the change in the company name as part of the evidence to support his charge. Corrigan charged further that Ferris was acting for McKinney in his actions and decisions rather than for the best interest of the Corrigan family. He accused McKinney of being so antagonistic in attitude as to make cooperation with him impossible.

The court decided, after weeks of argument, not to grant the five-year continuance of the trusteeship that McKinney and Ferris had been seeking. Jimmy Corrigan was given control, at last, of his father’s estate, whose worth was estimated to be at least twenty million dollars; more likely, thirty million dollars.

Jimmy Corrigan now had a 40 per cent stock control, and he was first vice president of the steel company as well as a member of the board of directors, but he did not have control of the corporation, It still rested in the hands of Price McKinney and his associates. Corrigan apparently was resigned to this state of business affairs, but not his wife, Laura never was willing to settle for anything but the role of leader. On the other hand, she knew nothing about business or high finance, and opposing her and her husband were some of the canniest, most experienced men in the steel industry.

Laura, nevertheless, returned to the United States with Jimmy in 1925 and did battle for control of the steel company. It wasn’t much of a fight. The family of Captain Corrigan’s old associate, Stevenson Burke, held some 13 per cent of the stock in McKinney Steel Company, and Laura persuaded them to part with it for a sum said to be in excess of five million dollars. When she told her husband the price, he was staggered; they simply did not have that much money to invest. The wherewithal was a minor detail, as far as Laura was concerned. She hocked all the family silver, her magnificent collection of jewelry, and then borrowed the rest.

So it came about that one day in May 1925, Jimmy Corrigan strolled into a meeting of the board of directors of the McKinney Steel Company and announced that he was the boss. The former Burke stock holding of 13 per cent, added to Carrigan’s original holding of 40 per cent, clearly gave him a tidy total of 53 per cent of the company stock and indisputable control. The company issued a statement that the new president of McKinney Steel Company was James W. Corrigan.

Price McKinney, a very capable steel executive and old friend of Captain Corrigan, went home in defeat and a short while later committed suicide.

As president of the company, Jimmy now was committed to stay on in his old hometown, except for occasional trips to London, where Laura spent most of her time. He changed the company name back to Corrigan, McKinney Steel Company and renewed his acquaintanceship with his old circle of friends in Cleveland. His tenure as a steel executive, however, was short. On January 22, 1928, three years after gaining control of the company, Jimmy left the Hollenden Hotel and walked leisurely to his favorite haunt, the Cleveland Athletic Club on Euclid Avenue, where he planned to have dinner and then bowl with the C.A.C. Indians. He was pulling open the door that led into the C.A.C. lobby when he staggered back as if struck, and dropped to one knee. He pulled himself to his feet again with difficulty and had gotten through the doorway when he fell to the lobby floor. Jimmy Lee, the club’s athletic director, and James F. Green, the doorman, carried him into the elevator and up to the Turkish bath on the eleventh floor, where a physician-member, Dr. Herbert L. Davis, pronounced him dead. He was forty-seven years old.

Laura stayed in Cleveland only long enough to attend the funeral and to make financial and business arrangements with her bankers and her late husband’s steel associates. She now was in control of the largest independent steel company in the United States, but this gratifying circumstance was not allowed to interfere with her major responsibility; namely, leading international society on to new, loftier heights. Mrs. Corrigan’s permanent residence was firmly established in London, with occasional side trips to Paris, and she resumed her social leadership now with even greater gusto-a side product, perhaps, of the security that comes out of the inheritance of more than twenty million dollars.

In the fabulous years that followed, Laura Corrigan established herself as one of those rare persons of whom legends are made. There no longer was any doubt about her pre-eminence as a social hostess, but the accounts of her triumphant performance still had the power to make Cleveland society wince, such as the time the leading prince of India, the incredibly wealthy Gaekwar of Baroda, turned down a previous invitation to attend a party in the home of a leading American family of the “Knickerbocker” set in favor of an invitation from Mrs. Corrigan.

One season, it is said, the Cleveland social reject spent as much as five million dollars on entertaining. Her specialty was the unusual. One party would have an Oriental setting, with real, genuine Orientals imported from the rice paddies for atmosphere, while another would provide a South Seas environment, complete with palm trees, monkeys, outrigger canoes, and whatever else was necessary. She thought nothing of financing the trips of her party guests from all parts of the world, and it was her custom not only to pay the expenses incurred by the guests, but also to provide them with high-priced gifts.

One who knew her well, Winsor French, a popular Cleveland Press columnist and himself a member of Cleveland society, wrote of Laura’s ascendancy:

“She had a fine time with her money, too. Year after year she rented vast houses at the most expensive resorts, filling them with equally expensive guests. Gold cigaret cases she bought by the gross, to be given away as favors at her dinners.

“Aware that many of her friends had little else beyond their titles, position, and the clothes on their backs, Laura doled out spending money the way one might tip a waiter. She also bought paintings- fine portraits, which in time she came to think of as ‘family portraits,’ and described them as just that. It is difficult to believe that she could have fooled anyone, but the purchased ‘ancestry’ gave her a sense of security.

“Whatever else she may have become, however, no one could ever describe Laura Corrigan as a connoisseur of art. One time she gave $25,000 to the Cleveland Museum with instructions it should be used to purchase a fine painting in memory of Jimmy Corrigan. It was, too; a magnificent Cezanne, ‘Pigeon Tower at Montbriand.’

“Laura, when she saw it, was so horrified that she tore from the frame the bronze plate describing it as a gift to the memory of her late husband. It was her first and last donation to the museum.”

Mrs. Corrigan’s career was dimmed and almost extinguished during the brief reign of King Edward VIII, whose dislike she had incurred when he was Prince of Wales at the time she had crossed the Mountbattens. King Edward disliked her and made no pretense of gallantry, repeatedly striking her name off dinner and party lists. No doubt the coolness that prevailed between Mrs. Corrigan and another American woman in London, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, had something to do with the new monarch’s attitude and actions.

Laura at one time had embarrassed the Royal Family by giving a mink coat to Princess Marina of Greece at the time the princess announced her engagement to the Duke of Kent. The princess accepted the gift and wore it, thus obligating the Royal Family to invite Mrs. Corrigan to the wedding. It was a dilemma, but wise Laura provided a graceful, face- saving out by booking passage aboard an ocean liner for America at the time the wedding was to be held, just in case an invitation was not forthcoming. The invitation was issued- but it was not delivered to her until she was past the point of no return, in midocean.

When King Edward VIII abdicated the throne, the Corrigan fortunes soared high once again. Laura was a good friend of the new ruling couple, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and their favor restored her to her leading position as a social hostess. She swept back into the lead again with bigger and better parties.

It was said that Mrs. Corrigan, an intellectually active woman, was especially adept at the art of conversation, this being one of the charms that brought her famous guests back to her table time and time again-that and her generosity, of course. It is recorded, however, that there was one occasion, at least, when her conversation flow was dammed. That came about at the time she was seated at the dinner table between Author George Moore and the Marquess of Donegal. There had been a lull in the party chatter and that was the precise moment that Moore, moodily twisting his goblet of water, suddenly chose to say loudly:

“You know, Mrs. Corrigan, I always think that of all the sexual abnormalities, abstinence is by far the most revolting!”

Laura could only stare at her guest, completely tongue-tied by his non sequitur.

Even though her trips back home were infrequent, she still managed to give Clevelanders one of the most interesting sideshows of the entire Depression period when, in April 1938, she transferred her fortune from the Union Trust Company to the vaults of the National City Bank.

This involved the movement of a cool twenty-one million dollars and required the services of three Brinks armored trucks, twenty armed guards to line the block from the Union Trust at Chester Avenue and East 9th Street to the Vincent Avenue entrance of National City, one block west, a large detachment of policemen, scores of plainclothes detectives and, finally, some trustworthy bankers to help carry the load. One bank officer carried a suitcase containing eight million dollars in government securities; another carried a package containing three million dollars in bonds.

Hundreds of Clevelanders lined the route, thrilled by their proximity to the green stuff that was so hard to come by during the Depression. Many of Laura Corrigan’s old townspeople took a vicarious pleasure in her success, choosing to believe that her success in the international circles of society represented a kind of victory for the proletariat. They thrilled to society page items, such as this one that appeared in 1938 in the Cleveland News:

“Now comes announcement that Mrs. Corrigan (such is her simple way of styling herself) is planning a ball in London which promises to be one of the most lavish of the West End social season. She has taken over the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough’s town mansion, known to the postman as No. 11 Kensington Palace Gardens, and will open it on June 23.

“Rumor has it that the king and queen will look in…”

A short time before the coronation, Laura visited the United States and was herself the guest of honor at a party held in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. It was a barnyard party which featured a prop cow that yielded champagne when milked, some perfumed pigs, and other interesting livestock imported from Leonard Hanna’s farm near Cleveland. One of the highlights of the evening was a hog-calling demonstration. Mrs. Carrigan’s memory of Cleveland remained sharply in focus even under the softening influence of high success overseas, as is illustrated by a story that Jerome Zerbe, member of a socially prominent Cleveland family and society editor of Town & Country magazine, liked to tell.

Jimmy Corrigan had been a close friend of Zerbe’s parents and was a frequent visitor up to the time of his marriage.

“When finally he married his woman friend of many years, the McKinneys and their friends dropped him,” wrote Zerbe. ’’Finding themselves snubbed by those they wanted to know, the Corrigans left Cleveland.

“By 1930, Mrs. James Carrigan was a glittering figure in international society. Her husband’s millions had taken her far, and many a king and queen she counted among her friends.

“That year I was seated next to her at a luncheon in Paris. Giving my place card a casual glance, she said: ‘Zerbsky! You must be Palish!’

“I replied that I was afraid she hadn’t read my card properly. Picking it up, she exclaimed, ‘Jerome Zerbe! Why your mother helped drive me from Cleveland!’

“‘You must be eternally grateful,’ I replied.”

It would be incorrect to conclude from Laura’s glittering record of success as a hostess that she thereby had won full membership in European society. There is more than a casual collection of evidence to support the belief that in her eagerness to associate with the mighty she had become a kind of court jester. Many of the run-down-at-the-heels members of nobility who accepted her lavish hospitality were among her leading detractors in private and vied with one another in ridiculing her. Laura, on the other hand, provided them with a lot of material to enliven their snickering sessions. She was a woman of strange ways, some of which sprang out of her pathetic eagerness to prove her acquired sophistication. But no matter how deeply she dug into her silk purse, every now and then a sow’s ear would fall out to remind everybody that she had been raised on a Wisconsin farm.

One of the minor eccentricities which delighted the blase socialites was her willingness to enliven a quiet dinner party by standing on her head. And she could be counted on frequently to embroider her conversational contributions with malapropisms of astonishing range and Originality. Her former townsman, Zerbe, offers some examples of her virtuosity in this field in his book, The Art of Social Climbing, which includes a rather definitive study of Mrs. Corrigan’s career.

According to Zerbe, Mrs. Corrigan “always thought that backgammon was a game called Bagatelle,” and that upon being introduced to the Aga Khan she volunteered the information that she knew his brother, Otto, quite well. He recalls that Laura attended a John Gielgud performance in Hamlet, and was asked by Lady Juliet Duff if she had enjoyed the play. “Oh, yes,” Laura is supposed to have replied, “I found it so interesting. You know I am so intimate with the King of Denmark!”

Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, in her book Grace and Favor, recalls that among the most memorable of the malapropisms attributed to Mrs. Corrigan was the one in which she allegedly said of a cathedral that “the :flying buttocks were magnificent.”

All of her slips and misusages were treasured by the malicious ones who gathered around her board and accepted her gifts. Possibly they resented their own weakness that permitted her to buy her way into their company, but at any rate they lost no time in putting the latest Mrs. Corrigan stories into circulation. Among these gossipy yams there was almost certain to be one related to Laura’s hair- or lack thereof.

She had a magnificent collection of wigs in a day when false hairpieces were not the accepted part of a woman’s personal effects that they are today. She had wigs of all kinds to meet every occasion and to represent every possible situation, and it was generally believed that she really needed the hairpieces; that she was, in fact, bald. Any number of stories purporting to prove this deficiency circulated freely in the upper levels of continental society, among them a stylishly embellished classic which said that she once attempted a swan dive into a pool at a resort and hit the water with such force that she lost not only her bathing hat but also her hair. But Laura was a spunky one and stayed underwater until she retrieved the headpiece, apparently preferring a watery grave to the embarrassment of emerging with a shiny, hairless noggin.

World War II interrupted Mrs. Corrigan’s glittering string of social victories, but it also proved that there was more to the old girl than tinsel and talk. Instead of heading for safe cover at the outbreak of the war, Laura headed straight for her beloved Paris to help out as much as she could. She was handicapped by a shortage of money, of all things, in her efforts to help soldiers and refugees as France reeled under the Nazi onslaught. Her funds in the United States were frozen by the American government, but that didn’t stop her. She received a special safe conduct pass from the Nazis and journeyed from Vichy to Paris, where she negotiated the sale of her magnificent collection of jewels to a German syndicate. She used the proceeds to help feed and clothe the French war victims, clumsily at first-one day she ordered sandwiches from the pantries of the Ritz Hotel to supply a Paris bread line- but always in a spirit of wholehearted generosity. Laura Corrigan the Humanitarian almost completely forget Laura Corrigan the Society Hostess.

“I have sold everything except my pearls (once valued at $350,000), my two wedding rings and my wristwatch,” she wrote to a friend. “All I possess here could be put in a suitcase.” Her wardrobe at that time consisted of two dresses. Instead of returning then to the comforts of America, Laura left Paris for Vichy, where she continued to help in the war relief work, living in an old pension where she shared a bathroom with six other women.

Winsor French described Laura Corrigan’s wartime role thusly:

“After the fall of France during World War II, Mrs. Corrigan discovered that she had hidden reserves of greatness. She forgot the titles and the hangers-on she had supported for years; she forgot herself and her silly ambitions and she went to work…. She had her magnificent moment and grabbed it!”

She did not lose her hauteur entirely in France, however. One day as she was riding an elevator in a hotel in Vichy, Hermann Goering got on, smiled, and bowed to her. Mrs. Carrigan looked at him frostily, stared meaningfully at her prized emerald that now glinted on the Nazi leader’s fat finger, and refused to acknowledge his greeting.

Society was still struggling to get back on its feet in January of 1948 when Mrs. Corrigan left the ruins of London to visit her sister, Mrs. David Armstrong-Taylor of San Francisco, who was to meet her in New York. Shortly after her arrival, Mrs. Corrigan became ill in her New York hotel. She died on January 22 -twenty years to the day after the death of her husband.

Gwen Brewster, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few months after the death of Mrs. Corrigan, wrote:

“Laura Mae Corrigan has delivered the snub supreme-posthumously. The books have been balanced by the last will and testament of the one-time Chicago stenographer who married into society, was given the deep-freeze treatment by the swanky sets of Cleveland and New York, then went to England to become London’s acknowledged social arbiter. The list of legatees named by Mrs. Corrigan… reads like a page from ’Burke’s Peerage: or the ‘Almanach de Gotha.’ Not a Clevelander or New Yorker is mentioned. Which means, says Society, that Laura Mae Corrigan has snubbed last-and best …”

Janet Flanner, writing as “Genet,” said in one of her Paris Letters to The New Yorker magazine: “Laura Corrigan is one of the most extraordinary American women that the Middle West ever produced and Europe utilized.”

They remember her in Cleveland. It isn’t likely they’ll ever forget the girl who wasn’t good enough…