Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning
Nicholas, Not the Saint.
(This continuation of the story of Nicholas Wiseman, the inventive con man who was also the uncle to Mavis Gallant, owes a great, great deal to the writer and historian Linda Granfield, whom I first met about 30 years ago, and on whose historical know-how and research acumen and unstinting generosity I’ve come to depend and for which I’m very grateful. Apart from anything else, Linda grew up in and around the Boston area where Nicholas was living when these events took place, and has an intuitive understanding of it as a kind of ground zero. Thanks, Linda. You are the best.)
I know these odd jottings are read by a small and select band of Mavis Gallant (MG) devotees, all of you highly evolved, and none of you requiring reminding of how, in the dawning days of 1923, all eyes were on the Ruhr Valley. You’ll remember how Germany, post-war, had grown lackadaisical about its reparation obligations — danke schoen, Treaty of Versailles — and France and Belgium were plain old fed up with all the cunning Hunnish evasions: the incessant shoulder shrugging, the histrionic displays of pocket-lining pulling, the reflexive moans of “wir können nicht.” Ignoring international pressure to show compassion and restraint, into the Ruhr they marched, les Francais, les Belges. That was on January 11. In some fetid beer hall, Adolf Hitler took note, paused in his Mein Kampf scribbling, checked the spelling of “putsch,” and rubbed his hands with freude.
The very next day, January 12, 1923, Paul Monte, the con artist formerly known as Nicholas Wiseman — his niece, Mavis Young, cradle-bound in Montreal, was by then five months old — made the first of what would be many newspaper appearances over the next several years. This is the headline of the (very brief) story in which he features.
In Winthrop, such a Gallic beckoning was surely not an everyday occurrence. Had I been writing the story for either the Greenfield Daily Recorder or the Fall River Evening News — it appeared in both papers — I think I might have mentioned, if only as a point of human interest, that said airman had a day job as a clerk in a shoe store, which was Paul’s / Nick’s vocation at this time. This detail, however, is overlooked. I might also have made a few inquiries and disclosed to the curious reader a few pertinents about how this intelligence was delivered. How did the news of this glorious, but private, communication become public? Did someone make an anonymous call? Or had there, in fact, been a press release? If so, by whom was it issued? Whatever the source, two papers in communities nearby to Winthrop told the story of how Paul Monte — he hadn’t yet metamorphosed into Count Paul Anatole Leon Monte — who was wounded while fighting for France in the First World War, had been put on notice by the French embassy in Washington that, as a reserve member of that country’s air service, he must be ready to be shipped off to the hotly contested Ruhr at the drop of a chapeau. One can well imagine Paul receiving this thrilling cable at work and pausing just long enough in his task of fitting a sturdy, brown Oxford, to rise and sing La Marseillaise. (1)
Nor could Paul’s fame as an airman — on whose services la France might be called upon to draw — be contained by the borders of New England. The next day, in the El Paso Herald, his thoughts (quite nuanced) on the evolving crisis in Europe are quoted, under the headline “Militaristic Clique Is Blamed for Invasion.” Speaking on behalf of all brave Frenchmen, this Romanian-born Canadian polygamist said:
“The people of the French nation as individuals are averse to the invasion of the Ruhr valley,” declared Lt. Paul Monte, of the French air service, who was notified Friday to be ready to return to France for active service. His summons came from the French embassy at Washington. He expects to sail for France some time this month. Lt. Monte declared that the present drastic step was being taken because of the influence of the military clique of France, and of the French bankers.”
Again, one wonders how anyone knew of Paul, and why the geopolitical deliberations of a shoe store clerk — even one who called himself a chiropodist, as Paul did — were considered worth the investment in ink, and why in El Paso, of all places? Did he have connections there from his brief Texas sojourn in 1920, when he was dispatched by Paris to serve as a flight instructor at Kelly Field, during which time he was known as Mortimer P. Montefiore, speaker of seventeen languages, and short-term husband of Merle E. Sapp, who surely entered into the union knowing about Ruth Connolly or Helene Delagarde or Esther Trattenberg, to whom Mortimer / Bruce / Nicholas / Paul was simultaneously allied? Let’s not waste our time in wondering. These questions, however worthwhile and self-evident, are long past the point of settling.
Whatever highly-placed French authorities had Lt. Monte in mind as their agent of victory in the Ruhr seem to have decided they could cope without his specialized interventions. Paul, safe to say, even though he was expecting to be shipped out within the month, was never deployed. Had he been, the story would surely have been told; also, the timeline of evidence that would emerge in a Salem court room a year or so later would make it plain that he remained in Winthrop and environs over the coming months, stirring up trouble that might otherwise have been inflicted on Teutonic debtors.
He caused some difficulties, for instance, for George Post, age 12, who, on February 15, 1924 , was struck at the corner of Broadway and Medford, in Boston, by a car piloted by Mr. Monte. His left leg and side were injured. He was rendered unconscious. To his credit, Paul sportingly stuck around until the child revived, and then gave George a lift home. Probably on the way he told the damaged lad all about his war wounds and how he’d overcome them. How the elder Posts reacted when their dazed and limping son was delivered up to them at 25 Beacon Place history does not record.
Between these two signal events — the 1923 invasion of the Ruhr and the striking down of George Post in 1924 — Paul had made the acquaintance of the Grover family of Lynn, one of the communities that comprised the North Shore Colony. By this meeting hangs a long and sordid tale.
The Grovers were well-to-do; the money came from shoes, via J. J. Grover and Sons, a footwear manufacturing concern founded in 1866. Lyndon Vassar Grover (1873 - 1930) was one of the sons, and when Paul came on the scene — insinuating himself into the inner reaches of the Grover domestic circle, the worm in their bud — Lyndon was the treasurer of the firm. Mr. Grover’s home, his castle, at 36 Kings’ Beach Road, was one of Lynn’s fabled showpieces. In Lynn, the Grovers were the folks who lived on the hill.
Lyndon’s voyage as a husband, though uneventful compared to Paul’s, had nevertheless not been smooth sailing. His first wife, Louie, died a year into the marriage: tuberculosis. The second Mrs. Grover, nee Grace Mabel Fuller, was a popular hostess and charity worker, well-known for the quality of her singing voice, and her willingness to entertain at society functions, of which there were many.
There were four children born of that marriage — Dorothy, Marjorie, Elizabeth and Lyndon Vassar Jr., on whom Grace conferred, to a greater or lesser degree, her creative spirit. Lyndon Jr. would become known for his artistic photographs of his girlfriends taken in compromising situations — more of that later — and Dorothy and Marjorie were standouts in the dancing class of Mrs. Bailey. In 1917, at one of their recitals, they created a “furore” with their interpretive prancing, which must have been in the style of Loie Fuller or Isadora Duncan. It was in that same year that Grace’s friends were were distressed on her behalf when Lyndon Sr. caused her to be committed to the state Asylum for the Insane at Westborough. She was held there for a number of months before being sprung, at which point she sensibly packed her trunk, left Massachusetts, went to California, and there she lived until living ceased, in 1945.
It seems to have been during the time of Grace’s confinement in Westborough that Lyndon Sr. began scouting about for her replacement. He settled on Eleanor Cleveland, an actress and producer, the eponymous mainstay of the Connecticut-based “Eleanor Cleveland Stock Company.” Born Minette (or Minetta) Eleanor Rietz, her marriage to Alfred Cleveland was so long dissolved you couldn’t find any particulates. Eleanor and Lyndon were married in 1919.
For a few years, pre-Monte, they were happy in Lynn, in the big house on King’s Beach Road. Eleanor Grover, as she became, brought two daughters — grown, or on the cusp of grown — into the household. Dorothy and Phyllis maintained the surname Cleveland. It was Dorothy who was mostly in the news stirred up by Paul Monte, but it was Phyllis with whom he first became acquainted in the late summer or early fall of 1923, i. e. after the invasion of the Ruhr, but before the collision with George Post. They somehow got to know one another at a Boston studio maintained by Mme. Thompson, a voice instructor. Phyllis, safe to say, was there for vocal coaching. Was Paul? Was he a singer, in addition to all his other accomplishments? Or was he a pianist, hired to accompany the students of Mme. Thompson? His mother, after all, had been a piano teacher. The reporting of the court case that would be the end of this meeting was voluminous, but omitted that detail. The point is, this was how it started. Paul met Phyllis. Through Phyllis Cleveland, Paul met Dorothy Cleveland and through Dorothy Cleveland Paul met their mother, Eleanor Cleveland Grover, and through Eleanor Cleveland Grover Paul met her husband — also the stepfather to Phyllis and Dorothy — Lyndon V. Grover. Lyndon, not knowing a vampire when he saw one, made the mistake of inviting Paul in. He was done for, and so was his happy family. Paul was the match that lit the fuse that detonated the powder keg of Lyndon and Eleanor’s mature but relatively untested marriage and spawned a legal case, Grover Vs. Grover, that would require 17 days of court time to settle and became the most talked about and scintillating social event of the Lynn social season for the spring of 1925. You couldn’t walk anywhere without inhaling the scent of dirty linen. It was utterly filthy. I’ll deliver the details over the weekend.
1. Anyone wanting to look more deeply into Paul Monte, shoe salesman, should know that our Paul Monte, formerly Nicholas Wiseman, is NOT the same Paul Monte who was an upstanding citizen of Falls City, Nebrasks, and ran a successful shoe store there for many years. As the French and Belgians were invading the Ruhr, he was having a sale.
