STARR FAITHFULL
DANGEROUS GAME STARR FAITHFULL, 1931
Wednesday, May 6th 1998, 2:04AM
BEACHCOMBER Daniel Moriarty was sifting through the sands on fashionable Long Beach, L.I., looking for trinkets abandoned by the beautiful people who had sunned themselves the day before.
It was just after dawn on Monday, June 8, 1931. A fog was rolling in, and with the fog came a body.
She came in facedown, rocking slowly in the waves, seaweed tangled in her sand-matted hair. She was 25 and beautiful. She wore a fitted black-and-white print dress with nothing underneath. She was badly bruised. Her name was Starr Faithfull.
She might have stepped from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a high-society girl who epitomized the age of jazz and bathtub gin, and the mystery of her final hours, the torrid secrets of her wanton flapper life and the desperate sadness that limned her eyes in every glamorous photograph would rivet the public for months.
There would be two explosive diaries detailing sexual adventures dating to her childhood. There would be melodramatic suicide notes, and charges they were forged. There would be broad hints that her death came as no small relief to certain prominent individuals.
“I’m not sorry she’s dead,” said her 19-year-old sister, Tucker. “She’s happier. Everybody’s happier.”
Nassau County District Attorney Elvin Edwards agreed. “Several people in high places will rest easier with her dead,” he said.
“I am playing a dangerous game,” the drowned woman had written a friend shortly before she disappeared. “There is no telling where I’ll land.”
SHE WAS barely on the morgue slab before her shocking double life began to spill out. The rich young beauty was a refined product of the finest finishing schools; she was also an out-of-control drunk, a wild-child party girl who snorted ether, gulped barbiturates and didn’t always come home every night to the family apartment at 12 St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village.
She liked to haunt the Cunard docks and crash bon voyage parties aboard outgoing ocean liners. Having sailed Cunard to Europe eight times, she was now, authorities decided, in the habit of trysting with various ships’ officers. On May 29, it was established, she had been put off the Franconia, sloshed and crazed and screaming. “Kill me!” she shrieked as she was wrestled ashore. “Throw me overboard!” Swiftly there arose reports that on Friday, June 5, the day her family saw her last, she had spirited herself aboard the Mauretania, which had sailed that night for the Bahamas.
Her stepfather, industrialist Stanley Faithfull, insisted to police that Starr kept no diary but detectives found one on Tuesday. And on Wednesday they were in Boston, questioning politically powerful Andrew Peters 59-year-old former mayor, ex-congressman, President Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the treasury, the man who had seconded Al Smith’s presidential nomination in June 1928. He was an old family friend. His wife was Starr’s mother’s first cousin.
By Friday, Starr’s diary what was printable of it was all over the headlines. The 40-page bombshell vividly detailed 14 years of drug-addled sexual adventures with at least 19 men, including London aristocrats, Manhattan playboys and, the papers said, a “man of political importance” who had been her “tutor” and who apparently had paid well for the privilege.
In Boston, Peters fumed that he had no knowledge of Starr’s demise and warned that he would not see his good name dragged into scandal. But in Nassau County, minutes before Starr’s body was to be cremated, Edwards suddenly ordered the proceeding stopped.
That night, police found another diary hidden in Starr’s room. The next day, authorities said they were now convinced that she had met her end aboard the Mauretania, perhaps 7 miles at sea, and been put over the rail. On Sunday, after reexamining the body, city toxicologist Dr. Alexander Goettler announced that Starr’s liver was full of the good-time drug Veronal that she had, in essence, gone asleep into the sea.
“Death by drowning,” said Edwards, “brought about by someone interested in closing her lips.”
Then he made a large point of blasting Stanley Faithfull and Starr’s sister Tucker, who had, it seemed to him, been less than fully forthcoming at every stage of the investigation. There was, he said, more to the story yet untold.
A FEW DAYS later, the case took a massive U-turn: Dr. George Jameson Carr, a Cunard ship’s surgeon just back from England, produced several letters purportedly mailed to him by Starr in her final hours. “When you receive this letter, I will have committed suicide by drowning,” she had written.
Starr had fallen for the doctor when he once helped her with a bad onboard hangover. Her affections were not returned. “You don’t become romantic about a girl on whom you used a stomach pump the first time you saw her,” Carr explained.
The letters were patently suicidal. Starr had resolved, she wrote, “to end my worthless, disorderly bore of an existence before I ruin anyone else’s life as well. I certainly have made a sordid futureless mess of it all.
“I take dope to forget and drink to try and like people, but it is of no use. Everything is an anti-climax to me now. I want oblivion.
“If there is an afterlife, it would be a dirty trick. But I’m sure 50 million priests are wrong.”
This appeared to bring some closure to the matter. Stanley Faithfull loudly insisted that the letters were forgeries and got a handwriting expert to declare them such. Police experts disagreed. And the tawdry tale of the beautiful and the damned came quietly to an end.
BUT IN late July, Stanley Faithfull went back to the papers, charging “shameful official negligence”; Edwards, he said, was “lying down on the job,” intimidated by persons “too big and influential for him to tackle.” His stepdaughter, he alleged, had been kidnaped and “criminally drowned” by hired assassins. And he produced stunning documents: copies of a $20,000 check from Andrew Peters and a 1927 agreement releasing Peters from liability in the seduction and ruination of Starr Faithfull when she was 11.
In Boston, Peters immediately suffered a nervous collapse as the ghosts of his past rose up to forever destroy his career and social standing. In Nassau County, Edwards declared that he firmly believed Starr to have been murdered but that he had no evidence. “Neither Peters nor anybody else is so highly placed that I won’t proceed against them,” the district attorney sputtered.
Now the Daily News opened its own investigation and soon asserted that industrialist Faithfull was nearly broke and that several days before Starr disappeared he had traveled to Boston to seek additional pay-offs from Peters.
Enraged, Faithfull sued The News and several other papers for libel. Late in the year, the courts dismissed his claim.
About that same time, a final inquest into Starr Faithfull’s death was held. It was over in 15 minutes, and it reached no conclusion.
“Whatever I decide,” said Nassau County Coroner Edward Neu, “it will be only a matter of opinion.”
BIG TOWN BIG TIME A NEW YORK EPIC: 1898-1998 CHAPTER 64
Monday, Jun. 29, 1931
The Press: Five Starr Faithfull
If the bruised body of a pretty girl with veronal in the liver were washed ashore on the sands of Long Beach, N. Y.; if she were found to be of respectable but somewhat eccentric family; if her diary revealed her as a neurotic and alluded to childhood misadventures with an unnamed, elderly and prominent man; if the girl’s name were Sadie Schmitz and she lived, say, on West 17th Street, New York; if such a case occurred in cool weather with an abundance of other news breaking concurrently—how would the newspapers treat it? Probable answer: as a good local five-day sex mystery, to be slipped off the front pages of conservative papers if no solution was forthcoming.
But if the dead girl’s name were Starr Faithfull; if she had had an eventful sex life on two continents; if her address were No. 12 St. Luke’s Place, three doors from Mayor James J. Walker; if her sister, Tucker Faithfull, were a secretive girl whose full lips and slim legs photographed well; and if the story broke during a heat wave and a scarcity of big news—then, as happened last fortnight, the august New York Times might consider it fit to print front-page for nearly two weeks. Cyrus H. K. Curtis’ polite New York Evening Post might feature on its front page a three-column drawing of the girl’s family and dog in their home. The Chicago Tribune might feel called upon to print an 8-column banner: SCAN SLAIN GIRL’S LOVE DIARY. The Atlanta Constitution, San Francisco Examiner, Milwaukee Sentinel, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Indianapolis News might go for the story, as go for it they did. So did the newspapers of Boston, so energetically that Andrew J. Peters, onetime Boston Mayor, whose wife was a distant cousin of Starr Faithfull’s mother, found occasion to issue a formal denial that he had ever been improperly involved with the girl.
The potentialities of the strange story as hot-weather reading were in nowise chilled by Nassau County’s publicity-wise District Attorney Elvin Newton Edwards, who had just finished the noisy business of sending hare-brained Francis (“Two-Gun”) Crowley to the electric chair (TIME, June 15). Soon after Starr Faithfull’s body was found, the district attorney announced she had been killed by two men. one prominent in politics, her body taken out in a boat and thrown overboard. Next day he declared that the girl was knocked unconscious aboard a boat, then thrown into the water. By then the prominent politician had been “practically eliminated.” Ultimately Prosecutor Edwards was weighing suicide against the murder theory.
But the paucity of essential facts was more than made up for to the Press by Starr Faithfull’s background and home life. The family, occupying one floor of a brownstone house, consisted of Starr, her sister, her mother and stepfather, Stanley Faithfull, a not prosperous chemist and salesman for a pneumatic mattress concern. Lean, gimlet-eyed, red-whiskered, bewildered, he talked & talked to the thronging newshawks who came away with many conflicting stories and white lies. For some reason his daughter was made an “heiress” by the first sensational stories, a description soon dropped by all but the tabloids. But other newspapers kept the family endowed with an air of gentility, apparently as an excuse to give the story special attention.
Officials of the United Press, impressed by the national demand for the story, set out to get all they could of it. Believing that reporters on the case were using wrong strategy, they simply asked for, and with the immediately parents. obtained, a They won private Faithfull’s interview confidence, persuaded him that a full explanation of Starr’s makeup would mitigate the impression of promiscuity which had gone forth. The result, an “exclusive” for the U. P., was the full details of how the girl had been induced to unnatural sexual antics at the age of eleven by the elderly man, a trusted friend of the fam ily; how he had repeatedly over a period of years taken her on automobile trips, stopping at hotels, with knowledge and consent of the parents who never dreamed that his interest was other than fatherly: how Starr, who was emotionally unbalanced as a result, finally made known the facts to her parents; how they obtained a $20,000 settlement from the despoiler to pay for treatment of Starr by psychiatrists and neurologists. For all their effort, they said, Starr never fully recovered nor mality. With their full knowledge if not their consent she had run around with (and after) all kinds of men in all kinds of places “looking for happiness.” In return for the story, Faithfull insisted only on a letter which would prove that no payment was being made for it to him or his family.
The New York World-Telegram and other United Press subscribers embellished Father Faithfull’s sad story with facsimiles of erotic pages from Starr’s memory book, letters, telegrams. Star writers were put on the lurid story to treat it as an epic of injured innocence, a cause celebre of the decade. Fresh interest, fresh front-page stories (again including the Times) were supplied by the arrival from England of a Cunard Line doctor who revealed that Heroine Faithfull had come to see him on shipboard just before she disappeared from home, that he had sent her away because she was drunk, that she had written him she was going to commit suicide. The doctor’s picture now made display material as the epic passed into its third week. Observers marveled at what the great U. S. Press could do with the conjunction of a perfect front-page name, a sexy death mystery and a spell of hot weather.