During his heyday, which was short, he was identified by reporters variously as Louis Henry Rodney Gordon La-Tri; Louis Henry Rodney La Trae; Louis Henri R Q LaTrae; and, most economically, in his professional capacity as a fancy dancer, as La Trae.
He born Roland Wayne Kreigbaum (sometimes Kreighbaum) in Chicago, February 15, 1895. When he died in Pasadena, February 18, 1938, the brief obituary in the Wichita Falls Times (placed there by his father, who had retired to Kansas, and who reasonably assumed his friends and associates would wish to acknowledge his bereavement) didn’t name a specific cause of death, but hinted that the outcome was the inevitable, painfully attenuated consequence of something tragic and heroic: “Kreigbaum never fully recovered from hurts he sustained when his plane was shot down between the lines on the western front,” it said.
Other biographical highlights were overlooked. No mention was made of Roland’s two arrests in Chicago for mail theft in 1915 but, well, you know, discretion, and, after all, one pays by the word for such notices, as the elder Mr. Kreigbaum would have known very well, having once been employed in Arizona as a compositor at the Tuscon Citizen. Removed to Wichita Falls, and rendered insensible by grief at the news from Pasadena, we can forgive him for having forgotten that while at the Citizen he had published (August 10, 1918) a breezily unconcerned and wholesomely prosaic “letter from the front” young Roland had composed in France from the relative safety of the Red Cross hospital where he was making a speedy recovery from pleurisy. A less stirring document it would be hard to conjure. Replying to a question his father had asked in an earlier communique, Roland wrote that, to the best of his knowledge, his grandmother was now living in Indiana, which seems — to me at least — a roundabout way, geographically speaking, of passing along news of family and their whereabouts. No mention was made of dogfights over Flanders or the Red Baron or anything else that would suggest an eventual death from the lingering effects of strafing or crashing or lengthy confinement as a POW. But perhaps that omission was made out of modesty.
Far be it from me to throw shade on deeds of derring-do or to cast aspersions on the dead, but a quick look at Roland’s military service suggests that he was abstracted from the more epic manifestations of combat; that he was sent to France a few months before the war ended; that he served there in the challenging but earth-bound capacity of wagoner; and that he returned to America, to the northern bread basket, its amber waves of grain, and also to his job as a car mechanic, in short order, safe and sound. Possibly he had a lingering cough from the pleurisy. Maybe he had a scar on his shin from the time he was kicked by a mule. Such speculation is as unseemly as it is unverifiable. Whatever he might have endured, Roland was well enough to marry a Minneapolis girl named Lillian Folstad. Time, not much, went by. Then, in a classic case of “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” Roland tired of the Twin Cities, likewise of Lillian, took himself back to Chicago, made a slight alteration to his name — Louis Henry Rodney La Trae, or one of its variants, see above — and declared an affiliation with the House of Bourbon. Naturally light on his feet — being shot down between the lines on the western front had in no way impaired his gift for cutting a rug — La Trae, as now he identified, representing himself to be of French and of noble origin, caught the attention of a working dancer, a prima ballerina and exponent of the Russian school, who went by the name Tina Valen.
She was Valentina Shmuklovsky (or Shimklovsky) when she arrived with her family from Russia, via Montreal, in 1922. They were an artistic clan; her father, Dimitri Shmuklovsky (circa1880 - 1958) was a composer and bass player with the Chicago Symphony, and later in Miami. When Louis Henry Rodney etc formed an alliance withTina — they married — it was Dimitri who began to wonder about the bona fides of this new son-in-law with his claim to being a displaced French nobleman. Inquiries were made, and it didn’t take long to establish that he was Roland, that he had no connection to French nobility, that he had not troubled to divorce Lillian before marrying Tina, and that he was wanted on a number of charges of theft, fraud, passing bad cheques, etc. Tina, to her credit — she had been dazzled out her mind by his dancing — stood by him, for a while. Then, she didn’t.
The marriage was annulled, likewise their Valen /La Trae terpsichoric partnership, and he drifted south. In Florida, he got hitched to Marguerite Louise Starr, herself no stranger to the wedded state, and then they headed west to California where, as aspiring actor Louis Henri R Q LaTrae, Roland had precisely no career at all. Then he died. Marguerite, on whom no moss grew, remarried a few months later.
Blue-blood impersonators are nothing new, nor is the gullibility that makes their con so easy to carry off. The great unwashed, the sadly untitled, hankering after the validation that comes from a close alliance with the well-born, are easily duped by someone with a plausible backstory, a top hat, cane, kid gloves, a gift for accents, and plenty of ideas about how and where they’ll invest your dough if only you’ll turn it over. Fake Russian, Italian, English, and Scottish nobles have come and gone over the years. Between the wars, in the United States, there seems to have been a particular preponderance of bespoke French aristocrats, many with names and reputations that might have been crafted had P. G. Wodehouse sat down one night with Marcel Proust and really tucked into the absinthe.
In addition to Louis Henri R Q LaTrae, q.v., there was Jacques de Vries, who claimed to be a French count, and who was arraigned in Los Angeles, June 23, 1931, when he was discovered to have been on the receiving end of eighty dozen pairs of stolen silk socks; also of interest was his correspondence with the King of Siam, in which was contained his negotiations for the purchase of 900,000 acres of teak forest.
In 1928, in Darien Connecticut, Boutand de la Combe, another French count, was arrested for running a bootlegging operation, and forfeited a $500 bond when he failed to appear in court.
In 1930, again in Los Angeles, Count E. W. Rolf Rique, whose frequent brushes with the law were accompanied by pleas of amnesia, was arrested after he eloped with the wife of J. C. Davis, taking also the family car and a sizeable chunk of change.
Count Louis Pellesier (fl. 1940) let it be known that he was the heir to a fortune in South Africa, and cultivated a gaggle of clients for his interior design business in San Francisco before he was revealed to be “a Dust Bowl emigrant, an employee of a livestock pavilion and a barker for a snake show.”
For many years in the Boston area Philippe De Clemency D’Aubigny, a “General” in the French army, (see photo above) passed worthless cheques, perpetrated frauds, and married unsuspecting show girls. He would be arrested, jailed, re-emerge, and find another cake from which to jump.
Nor should we overlook Fred Landor, aka Gustav Donwitz, aka Childe De Rohan Harcourt, son of the late Eugene, Count d’Harcourt, nephew of the Tenth Duc D’Harcourt of the royalist family of Calvados, France who circulated amongst the young Bohemians of Greenwich Village in the mid-1920’s and once burned his paintings on the sidewalk outside his building as a protest against the commercialization of art, from which blight he was not, noticeably, suffering.
In 1931, in Des Moines, Iowa, a man named Robert Burke, claiming to be both a French count and a representative of the Baldwin piano company, tried to insinuate himself into the affections of a young woman named Alberta Hodge with promises of riches and also a baby grand that turned out to be in poor repair and also not his to give.
I could go on, but let me cite just one more example, about whom not much is known but about whom I’m willing to go out on speculation’s wonky limb. In 1918, in Oakland, California, a young woman named Rita Nelson was introduced to a man who claimed to be the (what else?) French Count Rochet De Cheveley. It was love at first sight, coup de foudre, but she was well-bred and cautious and required reassurances before she could agree to his quickly tendered proposal of marriage. He told her — not necessarily in this order — that he was a Major in the French army, that he had been assigned (by whom?) to travel to Rockwell Field in San Diego there to instruct young American aviators in the finer arts of taming the wild blue yonder, that he was not in uniform because he did not like to show off, that he was a member of a fine French family, that he had had his car shipped from France and it would soon be delivered from New York, that he would replace the modest ring he had given her with one worth $5000 at some point in the near but indeterminate future, and that proof of his identity would come from the French consul in San Francisco, a personal friend, on whom they called several times, but never when he was at home. Eventually, Rita was persuaded to marry Rochet and, directly the knot was tied, as pressure was mounting from his superiors that he report to San Diego, they took the train to Los Angeles where she — La Comtesse De Cheveley — was installed in the Roslyn Hotel, and Rochet went off to Rockwell Field promising to return as soon as ever he was able. Reader, she never saw him again.
All this took place in the late summer and early fall of 1918. The marriage was annulled about six months later, in 1919, and over the course of the hearings it was determined that the friends through whom Rita had met the Count had first known him as Mr. De Young. The details of his aristocratic, trans-Atlantic roots emerged over time, and while no one ever saw any evidence that he was a skilled airman, he did seem adept as a tinkerer with engines and although he passed as a “plausible American,” he did seem to speak French. He made a persuasive case. They were all taken in.
Count Rochet de Cheveley was never heard from again, and in the storied annals of fake French nobility he’s altogether average. Not much about him stands out, really, and the only reason I paid him any mind at all was because something about that story, about the comic book name and the dubious claims to aristocratic and military authenticity reminded me of the story that appeared in the Quad City Times, Davenport, Iowa, on November 9, 1920.
If you’ve read the last couple of dispatches published here, this will look familiar. Mortimer P. Monterfiore — the P. was for Paul — was one of the pseudonyms used by Nicholas Wiseman, the eccentric-to-the-point-of-sociopathy uncle of Mavis Gallant (MG). In October of 1920, one month prior to his transfer to Texas, Mortimer Montefiore had been married to Ruth Connolly, in Detroit. This was despite the fact that two months before the marriage to Ruth, using the name Bruce Whitman, Nicholas was married to Helene Delagarde, in Quebec City. And it was shortly after arriving in Texas that Nicholas, still going by Mortimer, was married to Merle E. Sapp. To review: between August 10, 1920 and February 19, 1921, Nicholas / Bruce / Mortimer, walked three times to the altar, augmenting the far-flung harem he’d begun when he married his first (as near as we know) wife Esther in January of 1918, the same year that the Count Rochet de Cheveley turned up in Oakland. How likely would it have been that someone married in January would have run away from home, headed for California, courted and married another woman, and then disappeared? For most men, one would say “highly unlikely.” But Nicholas Wiseman was many cuts removed from average.
I have no way of knowing, of course, whether the mysterious philanderer Count Rochet De Cheveley, who so disrupted the life of Miss Rita Nelson, of Oakland, might also be Nicholas. The similarities are striking, but so what? A con’s a con, and those who are capable of merrily perpetrating such harm would have many points of Venn intersection, should one care to map them. There’s no reason to seriously suggest that the Count Rochet de Cheveley was our boy Nick, a charmer with a gift for engines and a fondness for uniforms, stretching his duplicitous wings, trying out yet another identity, seeing how the role of aristocrat might fit him; getting ready for his star turn as the Count Paul Anatole Leon Monte, just a couple of years and a couple of thousand miles away. More about him the next time.
Delightful piece of classic Bill R writing. Charming, subtle & amusing. Reminds me of the pieces Bill presented on CBC Sunday Edition with Michael Enright, and of course Bill's Roundup - Dear Sad Goat !
J. McC.
YOU HAVE SUCH AMAZING STORIES! I think about the chutzpah it would take to improvise like that. But also about how people are hooked by things they'd like to believe ("An actual count love me!") and then how hard one would have to work not to believe whatever came next because then one would have to accept that one was a sucker, an then an even worse sucker, and then an even worse sucker... How humiliating.
Six Degrees of Separation remains a favourite play and movie.
(That ballerina photo. Oh dear. Those legs and that dress.)