A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [110]
Whoever fabricated Frederick’s quotes may have thought he was being very cunning, but their effect was the opposite of what he’d intended. The Globe story induced Maria to give her first newspaper interview, to the Morning Journal newspaper in Manhattan. It was her first tentative step into the public arena to set the record straight.
“Grover Cleveland is the father, and to say otherwise is infamous,” Maria declared. “The attempt to connect the dead Oscar Folsom with me or my boy, of which I hear, is cruel and cowardly. I had but a very slight acquaintance with Oscar Folsom. It does not seem possible after all I have suffered for Grover Cleveland and my boy’s sake that an attempt will be made to further blacken me in the eyes of the world.”
Maria opened up about her ordeal, but just a little. She said that, in her prime, when she lived in Buffalo, men had found her attractive. “I was not as stout as I look now,” she ruefully admitted. “No one knows the extent of my sufferings. After my child was taken from me, I begged Cleveland on my knees to let me have a sight of my baby. He was immovable. I found where the boy was, and one day I rushed in before his keeper snatched him up and ran away before they could stop me.
“My sufferings, subsequently my fruitless efforts to have him fulfill his promise of marriage, his neglect of myself and child, my abduction and violent treatment by his hired tools were truthfully but only partially told in the Buffalo Telegraph of July 21. It would be impossible to cover the events that made up those years of shame, suffering, and degradation forced upon me by Grover Cleveland.”
A false rumor was making the rounds that Maria was thinking of issuing a statement clearing Cleveland of all charges. When Maria was asked about this, she exploded in anger. The reporter described what happened next. “Maria Halpin drew herself up, as preparing for a supreme effort, and replied in a most impressive and earnest manner, ‘Me, make a statement exonerating Grover Cleveland? Never! I would rather put a bullet through my heart.’”
13
THE AFFIDAVIT
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, CLEVELAND told Wilson Bissell, “The scandal business is about wound up. . . . I think the matter was managed in the best possible way.” Cleveland credited the turnaround to a “policy of not cringing.” It was a course of action, he said, which was “not only necessary but the only way.”
With the worst days of the Halpin crisis behind him, Grover Cleveland was enormously relieved. Sometimes, though, he had to wonder whether his friend Horatio King had gone too far in telling the New York World that Maria Halpin was a harlot and that Oscar Folsom had fathered her illegitimate child. Coming to the realization that King’s vilification of Maria may have been excessive, and could have consequences, “King’s interview made me trouble,” Cleveland admitted to Bissell. The dirty politics, he told Charles Goodyear, was making him feel “very blue,” and sometimes he wished the presidential nomination were “on some other shoulders than mine.”
Perhaps his political intuition was telling him that he had not heard the last of Maria Halpin.
A few voices, not many, spoke out in defense of Maria Halpin.
Judge was an upstart satirical magazine with nationwide circulation; it was modeled on Puck, its chief rival. Judge had been founded in 1881, and one of its contributing cartoonists was the gifted Frank Beard.
Beard was born “deaf as a post,” as he put it, in Plainville, Ohio. The only way he could hear was through a black rubber tube, which he always wore coiled around his neck. When he wanted to carry on a conversation,