A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [109]
Now another eminent public figure—Grover Cleveland—was facing allegations of having fathered an illegitimate child. Eunice was following all twists and turns. She clipped all the articles. She became obsessed with the story.
Without her husband’s knowledge, Eunice wrote a heartfelt letter to Cleveland, stuffing into the envelope several of the stories she had clipped. One article actually listed what was said to be the address of Cleveland’s favorite brothel in Albany, on 2nd Street. Another stated that Cleveland had been “grossly intoxicated” at his desk. Even his recent vacation to the Adirondacks was suspect. A Boston physician was quoted as saying it was his understanding that the true purpose of the trip was to cure Cleveland of a “malignant disease.” That was why he had taken Dr. Samuel Ward with him. (Ward became indignant when he was asked if he had accompanied Cleveland because he was ill. “What! The governor took no personal physicians into the woods with him. I took the governor. I ordered him to take a rest. Treatment! The only treatment he got was plenty of exercise that kept him almost steadily on the move from sunrise to sunset. A fine story indeed. What else will the liars manufacture?”)
When Mrs. Beecher’s letter reached Cleveland in Albany, it made him weak in the knees. She wanted—demanded—to know whether the stories were true. Henry Ward Beecher’s wife could not be ignored. As swiftly as he could, Cleveland wrote back.
“I am shocked and dumbfounded by the clippings from the newspapers that you sent me. . . . I have never seen in Albany a woman whom I have had any reason to suspect was in any way bad. I don’t know where any such woman lives in Albany. I have never been in any house in Albany except the Executive Mansion, the Executive Chamber, the First Orange Club House—twice on receptions given to me, and on, I think, two other occasions—and the residences of perhaps fifteen or twenty of the best citizens, to dine.
“There never was a man who has worked harder or more hours in a day. Almost all my times [sic] has been spent in the Executive Chamber, and I hardly think there have been twenty nights in the year and nine months I have lived in Albany—unless I was out of town—that I have left my work earlier than midnight to find my bed at the mansion. I am at a loss to know how it is that such terrible, wicked, and utterly baseless lies can be invented. The contemptible creatures who coin and pass these things appear to think that the affair which I have not denied makes me defenseless against any and all slanderers.”
Cleveland’s letter to Mrs. Beecher was, he said, “the most I have ever written on the subject” of Maria Halpin.
In early September, four weeks after Maria Halpin had vanished, she showed up at her uncle’s house in New Rochelle—“crushed in spirit and broken in health.” Between fitful periods of sleep, she had quite a story to tell James Seacord. For the last month, she had been living in a house on the West Side of Manhattan. Everything had been arranged through the Democratic Party. Maria had been free to leave at any time, but she had been told that her life would be in mortal danger if she were to return to New Rochelle. She had bought into this half-truth until she had come to the realization that it was a ruse to keep her isolated from the world and out of the public arena until Election Day in November.
Now back in New Rochelle and living under Seacord’s roof, Maria caught up on how the newspapers were reporting her story. It sickened her to read the extent to which her name had been smeared. Cleveland’s associates were branding her a vile harlot. General Horatio King’s interview with the New York World, in which he said in so many words that Oscar Folsom had fathered her illegitimate son, was especially tough to take.
Even Maria’s son was coming under