Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [34]
A program from this period identified Cora as Macà Motzki—her maiden name divided in two—and as a principal in “Vio & Motzki’s American Bright Lights Company, From the Principal American Theatres.” Her foil was to be an Italian tenor named Sandro Vio, identified in the program as “General Manager and Sole Director.” Crippen too was on the program, as “Acting Manager.” The plot involved romance and extortion and required Cora at one point to hurl a fistful of banknotes at Vio. She insisted the cash be real, though the resulting first-night scramble by the audience caused the management to command that fake money be used in future performances. The show lasted one week. Cora demonstrated a lack of talent so complete that at least one critic mocked her as “the Brooklyn Matzos Ball.”
The failure humiliated Cora and caused her to give up variety, at least for the time being.
THE CRIPPENS MOVED FROM South Crescent to Guildford Street, a block or so from where Dickens once lived, but soon afterward, around November 1899, Professor Munyon called Crippen back to America to run the company’s Philadelphia headquarters for a few months. He left Cora in London.
Something happened during that stay, though exactly what isn’t clear. When Crippen returned to London in June 1900, he was no longer employed by Munyon’s. He took over management, instead, of another patent medicine company, the Sovereign Remedy Co., on nearby Newman Street. At about this time, he and Cora moved back to Bloomsbury, this time to Store Street, where a century earlier Mary Wollstonecraft had lived. The Crippens’ new apartment was only half a block away from their old home on South Crescent and a brief walk to Crippen’s new office.
Crippen learned to his displeasure that while he was in America Cora had begun singing again, at “smoking concerts for payment.” She told him, moreover, that she intended to try once more to establish herself as a variety performer and had adopted a new stage name, Belle Elmore. And she had become even more ill tempered. “She was always finding fault with me,” he complained, “and every night she took some opportunity of quarrelling with me, so that we went to bed in rather a temper with each other. A little later on, after I found that this continued and she apparently did not wish to be familiar with me, I asked her what the matter was.”
And Cora—now Belle—told him. She revealed that during her husband’s absence she had met a man named Bruce Miller and, Crippen said, “that this man visited her, had taken her about, and was very fond of her, and also she was fond of him.”
THE GERMAN SPY
KAISER WILHELM II HAD INDEED taken notice of Marconi’s achievements. He long had resented Britain’s self-proclaimed superiority, despite the fact that he himself happened to be a nephew of Edward, the Prince of Wales, who would succeed Queen Victoria upon her death. He made no secret of his intention to build Germany into an imperial power and to hone his army and navy with the latest advances in science, including, if merited, wireless communication.
In the midst of a new series of tests at Salisbury Plain, during which Marconi set a new distance record of 6.8 miles, a German named Gilbert Kapp wrote to Preece to ask a favor. He was doing so, he stated, on behalf of a friend, whom he identified as “Privy Councillor Slaby.” This was Adolf Slaby, a professor in Berlin’s Technical High School. Kapp described him as “the private scientific adviser to the Emperor,” and wrote: “Any new invention or discovery interests the Emperor and he always asks Slaby to explain it [to] him. Lately the Emperor has read of your and Marconi’s experiments…and he wants Slaby to report on