A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [92]
Then King brought in his conversations with Cleveland.
“The governor frankly told me that my version of the stories was substantially correct, and that the account published in the Buffalo Telegraph was false and scandalous.”
The King interview created a sensation. At last the Cleveland campaign was fighting back. Here was a high-level Cleveland mouthpiece going on the record with the first spirited defense of the presidential candidate and his relationship with Maria Halpin. And what a story it was. King’s portrayal of Maria could not have been more cutting. She was “not a good woman”—stinging words in the Victorian Age. The woman’s morals were so loose she couldn’t positively identify the father of her child. It could have been any of two or four men who were passing her around Buffalo like a sexual plaything. In King’s rendering, Cleveland was a selfless hero who had assumed responsibility for the boy when he might not have been the father.
The pure malevolence of King’s interview reached the peak of cynicism when, in so many words, he accused the late Oscar Folsom of fathering Maria’s child. Folsom made the perfect fall guy. He was dead and couldn’t defend himself. Libel laws offered no protection for the departed.
The World interview received national attention, even from Republican newspapers, which found the prurient details too delicious to ignore. Not only was Maria Halpin a shamed woman, she was also a harlot. Now everything made sense.
To everyone, that is, except Maria Halpin.
11
FINDING MARIA
SOMETIME AROUND AUGUST 1, a Western Union telegram was delivered to the offices of the New Rochelle Pioneer newspaper. Addressed to the publisher, Charles Banks, who was an absentee owner, it ended up on the desk of the paper’s office manager.
The telegram came from a Republican Party contact in Pittsburgh, a hotbed of anti-Cleveland sentiment.
Interview Mrs. Maria Halpin who is said to have had child by Gov. Cleveland telegraph us before two o’clock this afternoon.
The name Maria Halpin was instantly familiar to the office manager. In the two weeks since the publication of “A Terrible Tale,” her name had become synonymous with the scandal that was threatening the presidential candidacy of Grover Cleveland. Everyone wanted to know what Maria Halpin had to say, but no one had been able to find her. The office manager was stunned to read that, not only had she been found—she was living right there in New Rochelle of all places, at the home of James Albert Seacord, a local carpenter. The telegram urgently asked Charles Banks to approach Mrs. Halpin and obtain an interview in which she would give a full “endorsement” of the revelations as published in the Buffalo Evening Telegraph.
New Rochelle had an interesting history. It was founded in 1688 by Protestants fleeing persecution in France. The Huguenot colonists were artisans and craftsmen from the French coastal city of La Rochelle. In this way, the village in the New World came to be called la Nouvelle-Rochelle. Even in 1884, New Rochelle retained an exotic distinctiveness. French was still spoken by many of the shopkeepers and tradesmen who were direct descendants of the original settlers. The village was also growing into a desirable town to live in for people who worked in New York City. The great showman George M. Cohan would in the not-too-distant future immortalize New Rochelle’s easy proximity to Manhattan with the song, “Forty-five Minutes from Broadway.”
As luck would have it, the office manager who opened the telegram was a die-hard Democrat. Rather than hand-deliver this