search. She called on Amanda Grady Mayfair, who had only recently left her husband, Cortland, and actually threatened Amanda.
As Amanda told our “undercover” society investigator later, “It was simply dreadful. She asked me to meet her for lunch at the Waldorf. Well, of course I didn’t want to do it. Rather like going into a cage at the zoo to have lunch with a lion. But I knew she was all upset about Antha, and I suppose I wanted to give her a piece of my mind. I wanted to tell her that she had driven Antha away, that she never should have isolated that poor little girl from her uncles and aunts and cousins who loved her.
“But, as soon as I sat down at the table, she started to threaten me. ‘Let me tell you, Amanda, if you are harboring Antha I can make trouble for you that you won’t believe.’ I wanted to throw my drink in her face. I was furious. I said, ‘Carlotta Mayfair, don’t you ever talk to me again, don’t you ever call me, or write to me, or come to my home. I had enough of you in New Orleans. I had enough of what your family did to Pierce and to Cortland. Don’t you ever ever come near me again.’ I tell you the smoke was coming out of my ears when I left the Waldorf. But you know, it is a regular technique with Carlotta. She makes an accusation as soon as she sees you. She’s been doing it for years, really. That way, you don’t have a chance to make an accusation against her.”
In the winter of 1939, our investigators located Antha in a very simple way. Elaine Barrett, our witchcraft scholar, in a routine meeting with Evan Neville suggested that Antha must have financed her escape with the famous Mayfair jewels and gold coins. Why not try the shops in New York where such items could be sold for quick money? Antha was located within the month.
Indeed, she had been selling rare and exquisite gold coins steadily to support herself since her arrival in 1939. Every coin dealer in New York knew her-the beautiful young woman with the fine manners and the cheerful smile who always brought in the rarest of merchandise, taken from a family collection in Virginia, she said.
“At first I thought her stuff was stolen,” said one coin dealer. “I mean these were three of the finest French coins I’d ever seen. I gave her a fraction of what they were worth and just waited. But absolutely nothing happened. When I made the sale, I saved her a percentage. And when she brought me some marvelous Roman coins, I paid her what they were worth. Now she’s a regular. I’d rather deal with her than some of the other people who come in here. I’ll tell you that much.”
It was a simple thing to follow Antha from one of these shops to a large apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village where she had been living with Sean Lacy, a handsome young Irish-American painter who showed considerable promise and had already exhibited with some critical approval several pieces of his work. Antha herself had become a writer. Everyone in the building and on the block knew the young couple. Our investigators collected reams of information almost overnight.
Antha was the sole support of Sean Lacy, friends said openly. She bought him anything he wanted, and he treated her like a queen. “He calls her his Southern Belle, actually, does everything for her. But then why shouldn’t he?” The apartment was “a wonderful place,” full of bookshelves to the ceiling, and big old comfortable overstuffed chairs.
“Sean has never painted so well. He’s done three portraits of her, all of them very interesting. And you can hear Antha’s typewriter going constantly. She sold one story, I heard, to some little literary magazine in Ohio. They threw a party over that one. She was so happy. She really is a little on the naive side. But she’s a swell kid.”
“She’d be a good writer if she’d write about what she knows,” said one young woman in a bar who claimed to have once been Sean’s lover. “But she writes these morbid fantasies about an old violet-colored house in New Orleans and a ghost who lives there-all very high-pitched, and hardly what will sell. She really ought to get away from all that rot and write about her experiences here in New York.”
Neighbors were fond of the young couple. “She can’t cook or do anything practical,” reported a female painter who lived above them, “but then why should she? She pays all the bills as it is. I asked Sean one time wherever does she get her money? He said she had a bottomless purse. All she ever had to do was reach in it. Then he laughed.”
Finally in the winter of 1940, Elaine Barrett, writing from London, urged our most responsible private investigator in New York to attempt to interview Antha. Elaine wanted desperately to go to New York herself, but it was out of the question. So she talked directly by phone to Allan Carver, a suave and sophisticated man who had worked for us for many years. Carver was a well-dressed and well-mannered gentleman of fifty. He found it a simple matter to make contact. A pleasure, in fact.
“I followed her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then happened upon her as she was sitting in front of one of the Rembrandts, just staring at it, rather lost in her thoughts. She is pretty, quite pretty, but very Bohemian. She was all wrapped up in wool that day, with her hair loose. I sat down beside her, flashed a copy of Hemingway’s short stories, and engaged her in conversation about him. Yes, she’d read Hemingway and she loved him. Did she love Rembrandt? Yes, she did. How about New York in general? Oh, she loved living here. She never wanted to be anyplace else. The city of New York was a person to her. She had never been so happy as she was now.
“There wasn’t a chance of getting her out of there with me. She was too guarded, too proper. So I made the most of it as quickly as I could.
“I got her talking about herself, her life, her husband, and her writing. Yes, she wanted to be a writer. And Sean wanted her to be. Sean wouldn’t be happy unless she was successful too. ‘You know, the only thing I can be is a writer,’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you’ve lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.’ It was all very touching actually, the way she spoke about it. She seemed altogether defenseless and absolutely genuine. I think, had I been thirty years younger, I would have fallen in love with her.
“ ‘But what kind of life did you have?’ I pressed her. ‘I can’t place your accent. But I know you’re not from New York.’
“ ‘Down south,’ she said. ‘It’s another world.’ She grew sad instantly, even agitated. ‘I want to forget all that,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve made this rule for myself. I’ll write about my past but I won’t talk about it. I’ll turn it into art if I can, but I won’t talk about it. I won’t give it life here, outside of art, if you follow what I mean.’
“I found this rather clever and interesting. I liked her. I cannot tell you how much I liked her. And you know, in my line of work, one gets so accustomed to just using people!
“ ‘Well, then tell me about what you write,’ I begged. ‘Just tell me about one of your stories for instance, assuming you write stories, or tell me about your poems.’
“ ‘If they’re any good, you’ll read them some day,’ she said, and then she gave me a parting smite and left. I think she’d become suspicious. I don’t know really. She was glancing around in a rather defensive way the whole time we talked. I even asked her at one point if she was expecting someone. She said not really, but ‘You never know.’ She acted as if she thought someone was watching her. And of course my people were watching her all the time. I felt pretty uncomfortable about it at that moment, I can tell you.”
Reports continued to pour in for months that Antha and Sean were happy. Sean, a big burly individual with an endearing sense of humor, had a one-man show in the Village which was quite a success. Antha had a short poem (seven lines) in
“Well, she’s pregnant,” said the upstairs painter, “and he doesn’t want the baby, you know, and of course she wants it and God knows what’s going to happen. He knows a doctor who can take care of it, you see, but she won’t hear of it. I hate to see her going through this, really. She’s much too fragile. I hear her crying down there in the night.”
On July 1, Sean Lacy died in a single car accident (mechanical failure) coming back from a visit to his ailing mother in upstate New York. A hysterical Antha had to be hospitalized at Bellevue. “We just didn’t know what to do with her,” said the upstairs painter. “For eight hours straight she screamed. Finally we called Bellevue. I’ll never know if we did the right thing.”
Records at Bellevue indicate Antha stopped screaming or indeed making any sound or movement as soon as she was admitted. She remained catatonic for over a week. Then she wrote the name “Cortland Mayfair” on a slip of paper, along with the words “Attorney, New Orleans.” Cortland’s firm was contacted at ten-thirty the following morning. At once Cortland called his estranged wife, Amanda Grady Mayfair, in New York and begged her to go to Bellevue and see to Antha until he could get there himself.
A horrid battle then began between Cortland and Carlotta, Cortland insisting that he should take care of Antha because Antha had sent for him. Contemporary gossip tells us Carlotta and Cortland took the train together
