A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [96]
When James Seacord got home, he found Maria gone. She had left him a note, which he found on a table under the lamp. It was addressed to Uncle Albert—Albert being his middle name.
Don’t worry, I am going away.
It was signed, Rittie.
Word had gotten out that Maria Halpin was living in New Rochelle, and James Seacord found himself in the middle of a 19th-century media frenzy. After Seacord had told all the reporters who’d come knocking that Maria Halpin had “gone away for a few days on a visit,” speculation swept the country that she had been kidnapped. Even reputable newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune expressed concern for Maria’s physical safety, reporting the bogus rumor that once again she had been thrown into a lunatic asylum against her will.
With Maria under wraps, Grover Cleveland’s people were free to tarnish the woman as a prostitute and drunk. Democratic publications gleefully slammed Maria to the brink of malicious libel. A profile of Maria published in the New York Mercury depicted her as the village vixen of New Rochelle who, in her youth, the newspaper said had attracted a “host of admirers.” She was a “magnetic girl . . . full of life . . . with a free and jolly disposition . . . the village belle.” Even in middle age, according to the Mercury profile, Maria was said to possess bewitching charm—she was a woman with a wealth of dark hair, a pale complexion, and a “strange, fascinating power” over men; in other words, a woman with loose morals.
The pro-Cleveland Boston Globe claimed to have obtained an exclusive sit-down interview with Maria from inside James Seacord’s house. According to this mendacious account, “Mrs. Halpin is evidently an epileptic, and she has every symptom of insanity. Her eyes are glassy; she cannot look her questioner in the face; she has the trembling twitching of the muscles and the sudden starts at every unexpected noise peculiar to insane persons.”
The preposterous article went on to describe how the front doorbell rang and Maria Halpin “sprang to her feet with a shudder and trembling like an aspen leaf rushed to the hall and frantically called out, ‘Mr. Seacord! Mr. Seacord!’”
It quoted Maria as saying, “I have been very sick, and am very sick now. I will not live six months I know.”
The entire story was an invention, published to debase Maria Halpin and raise doubts about her sanity. “I hope that Mr. Cleveland will be elected, and I would not want to put anything in the way of his success” went one fabricated quotation. “I do not wish Mr. Cleveland any harm. I have no quarrel with Mr. Cleveland. He is a good, plain, honest-hearted, nice man who has always been friendly to me and used me kindly. It is a shame that the newspapers should have issued such lies. I would not harm a hair on the head of Mr. Cleveland.”
Sadly, with the scandal at fever pitch, even Maria’s family sought to distance themselves from the scarlet woman. Her father, the retired police officer Robert Hovenden, was found living at 195 Ainslie Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In his eighties, infirm, and going blind from cataracts, until the publication of “A Terrible Tale,” he had known nothing of the ordeal Maria had suffered when she was in Buffalo. The fact that he had a grandson named Oscar whose father was Governor Grover Cleveland was news to him.
When a reporter from the Brooklyn Times interviewed Hovenden at his home, he defended the family honor: “I am known in this city and no one can point their finger at my children here.” He said he had lost contact with Maria when she moved to Buffalo following the death of her husband. “Afterwards, we learned that she was obliged to go out to work. She was, we heard, engaged