Episode 08: Never After
Everyone wants a happily ever after, though few are prepared for the misery that a broken heart brings.
Financial woes and broken hearts can increase the risk of suicide. Though the truth behind suicides in 1929 is more complicated than the prevailing myths. With the more recent concern in another rise, the close personal connections to the subject are revealed.
Archival music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.
Publish Date: July 23, 2020
Length: 19:59
Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
Section 1 Music: Nightfall by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics
Section 2 Music: Just A Mood by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics
Section 3 Music: Lost In A Fog by Coleman Hawkins & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics
End Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
AS THE MONEY BURNS
Podcast by Nicki Woodard
Episode 008 – Never After
00:00
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast by Nicki Woodard. Based on historical research, this is a deep exploration into what happened to a set of actual heirs and heiresses to some of America’s most famous fortunes when the Great Depression hits.
Each episode is comprised into three primary sections. Section 1 is a narrative story. Section 2 goes deeper into the historical facts behind the scenario. Section 3 focuses on contemporary emotional and personal connections.
00:28
Story Recap
Before the 1929 Wall Street Crash, teen heiresses Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke try to befriend It Girl Louise Van Alen, but Louise’s secret love affair with Prince Alexis Mdivani complicates everything. Meanwhile the ambitious Nanaline Duke wants to invest with the stockbroker husband of opera singer Cobina Wright.
00:50
Now back to AS THE MONEY BURNS
Title
Never After
[Music fade out]
Episode Tag
01:00
The popular saying is money can’t buy happiness. Everyone wants a happily ever after, though few are prepared for the misery that a broken heart brings.
Remember at the core of every fairytale is a nightmare.
01:13
[Music – Nightfall by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics]
Section 1 – Story
[Music fade out]
01:23
Flashback May 2, 1917, New York City
Inside a pre-Gatsby era glamorous master suite of the Plaza Hotel, a bejeweled woman in a white lace dress Edna Woolworth Hutton (early 30s) sobs on the phone while reading a letter, “He never loved me. He only married me for the money.”
Next to her hand is a flute of champagne. She pours the contents from a vial into it then swishes it around.
Edna continues, “He’s off with another one of his whores. I don’t know, some actress this time.”
01:59
Looking at a news photo of her husband Franklyn with another woman leaving a night club, she hangs up the phone and carries the flute out to the balcony. Contemplating the jump, she drips a little champagne and watches it fall. Below a crash between a motorcar and horse carriage momentarily snaps her to attention.
Her hand toys with her long stranded pearl necklace. She’s a little too drunk and wobbly to climb over the ledge. She gulps down the champagne and manages her way back into the suite.
With an angry sob, she pulls hard at her pearl necklace. The strand snaps throwing pearls everywhere. Edna stumbles and falls spilling the remaining champagne across the exotic red carpet.
02:43
Hours later…
Young Barbara (4 yrs old) runs into the room carrying a doll. She finds her mother and thinks she’s sleeping. Confused, young Barbara picks up a pearl.
A maid chases in after her and screams.
Soon the room fills with servants trying to revive Edna. Young Barbara hugs her doll lost in the chaos.
***
03:07
Back to the summer of 1929 in Newport, Rhode Island.
Newspapers from all over flash the headlines of how British showgirl Barbara Cole jumped to her death in Chicago after being rejected by her married lover and stockbroker Edwin Page. The kicker she was previously married to William Biddle, son of a tobacco magnate and relative of teen heiress Doris Duke.
Across the various Society members, it’s the sort of tale that spreads like wildfire.
03:39
Over at Rough Point, the coldly ambitious Nanaline Duke finishes her coffee and leaves the newspaper on the table. She has bitter feelings – if only her own problem could be so easily solved without all the scandal. After she leaves, socially awkward Doris picks up the article, and her jaws drop when she sees the Biddle family connection.
04:01
Inside the Beachmound estate, the now chubby budding fashionista teenage Barbara Hutton panics over the headline. In the midst of her detective work, she has the letter she took from It Girl Louise Van Alen during the polo dance and the similarly sealed envelope Prince Alexis put in Barbara’s poetry book. She debates what to do next.
“I told you Louise was in love with Alexis. I knew it.”
With her ever present matronly governess Ticki in tow, Barbara steams open the sealed envelope. Her eyes betray her despair as the letter is not a positive one.
“No, no, no, no… Ticki this can’t be. He can’t do this. He’s breaking up with Silvia. If he was back in Paris, they would have reunited. I know it.”
Ticki tries to console her young ward who is getting more and more bereft. The two conspirators are interrupted by Barbara’s stockbroker father Franklyn Hutton and her young stepmother Irene. Franklyn sees the poetry book and huffs at the nonsense of it all. Irene follows him around like a lost puppy. He squeezes her bottom and suggests they go upstairs. Absolutely no romance nor subtlety there.
After they leave, it is clear by the disgust on Barbara’s face how much that situation rankles her. “Everyone knows my mother didn’t die from an ear infection. She died from a broken heart. I can’t let that happen to Silvia and Alexis.”
05:28
At another estate, opera singer and supreme hostess Cobina Wright puts down the newspaper to focus on her adorable namesake tot Lil Cobina. They are having their daily luncheon together – Cobina’s favorite routine in the whole world.
“Mommy so missed our lunches while I was touring. Didn’t you?”
Lil Cobina nods. “Yes, Mommy, I missed you very much.”
The adorable little girl struggles to balance her sandwich with the crust cut off. She’s bound full of energy.
“So how was your morning, my dear?” – Cobina
“I swam like a mermaid.” – Lil Cobina
“That sounds like so much fun, and did you and Bobby build sandcastles?” – Cobina
As Lil Cobina mischievously giggles, her little gold curls bounce about her head.
“What is it, my dear?” – Cobina
Lil Cobina scowls, “You promise not to punish me?”
Cobina adjusts her napkin waiting for the inevitable childish confession. ”You know I’ll never punish you for telling me the truth.”
”He kissed me behind the cabanas.” – Lil Cobina
Trying to stifle her smile, Cobina inquires, “Oh my, and did you like it?”
Lil Cobina laughs more and shakes her head yes and no. “It was very messy. He gave me a big kiss like Daddy gave Miss Christie.” Miss Christie is the nanny.
Cobina drops her sandwich. A knife in the heart from the mouth of a babe.
06:54
Back in the Beachmound kitchen, Barbara spreads out the newspaper headlines and the love letters in front of her. To Ticki, Barbara protests, “They belong together. True love. They just need some help. If he could only see Silvia again, I know they’d be back together. I have to help them.”
Barbara tears up the letter and feverishly writes a new one. She’s not going to give up without a fight.
07:18
Meantime after lunch, Cobina furiously searches through her things. She finds an antique jewelry box and pulls out all the fine jewelry. At the very bottom, there is a letter with a small note.
I’m so sorry… I thought you should know…
From the folds of the letter, a newspaper clipping falls with the words popping out –
-Miss Stanley
-Suing
-William May Wright
-$20,000
-Shared an apartment
Tears fill Cobina’s eyes.
07:50
[Music – Just A Mood by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics]
Section 2 – History & Historiography
[Music fade out]
08:00
Any discussion involving the Wall Street Crash of 1929 inevitably leads to the often misquoted fact about the rise in suicides. It is commonly believed that a rash of suicides occurred on or after the infamous Tuesday, October 29th. This isn’t what happened.
In truth, suicides had been steadily increasing over the second half of the 1920s. For 1929, the peak of suicides happened during the summer while the stock market was soaring.
08:29
Immediately after the Crash, people anticipated a quick reversal back to good fortunes, but as the situation especially unemployment lingered suicides did increase over the next 2 years until peaking in 1932. Another morbid note, that in times of economic downturn nearly all other statistically calculated forms of mortality – 6 to be exact in 1930s – including cardiovascular, renal, tuberculosis, flu/pneumonia, and vehicular actually decreased with only suicide increasing.
Of course, economic downturn is not the only reason people commit suicide. The suicide rate correlates to cultural, social, political, and economic forces along with biological and psychological conditions. Suicidal ideation often accompanies a period of despair, heartache, and loss of identity. When part of a larger group, it seems people cope a little better to the circumstances than when one feels like the only one and isolated in a painful situation.
09:39
Throughout this series, we will revisit the subject of suicide multiple times as it comes to affect our characters. This is not a mere plot point, but a life point of which many of us will face one way or another. Thus, the first suicide explored is the most personal one with the biggest influence on our overarching story and more importantly our main character Barbara Hutton.
10:04
Long before 1929, Edna was the middle of Frank W. Woolworth’s three daughters. She had a lovely high caliber singing voice though never sang professionally. Her oldest sister Helena McCann had a stable marriage and lived relatively quiet in Long Island. Youngest Sister Jessie Donahue would go on to have a very extravagant life, including for a time funding the disgraced Duke and Duchess of Windsor – the former King of England who abdicated his throne to marry an American divorcee pre-World War II. Always melancholic and very shy, Edna married her exact opposite an energetic but womanizing man. Edna pre-deceased both her parents, and upon their later deaths her third of the Woolworth estate was directly inherited by Barbara, whose father Franklyn Hutton invested that huge sum of $26 million into the stock market.
11:00
The papers reported Edna’s death from mastoiditis, an ear infection. That’s another problem with getting to the truth about suicide – it has such a dark connotation and even a sin in certain religions that it becomes hard to uncover or know much about the past. Woolworth also likely interfered with any report. In public, it was an ear infection. In private, it was clearly known as a suicide, and yes in almost all accounts it was young Barbara who discovered the body.
11:30
Years later when asked about her mother, Barbara couldn’t say much since not having any true memories, only relaying that she always felt abandoned. For the next few years, she spent time with her eccentric grandfather, and after his death she was passed around her various aunts. Never having a true home, servants became Barbara’s de facto family. In childhood, she bonded with her French governess Ticki who served as an overly accommodating surrogate mother for nearly 40 years until her death. Even Barbara’s future husband Carey Grant struggled with that enmeshed relationship.
12:07
In 1929, a few suicides did make the headlines. In May, the first successful suicide by jumping from the Statue of Liberty’s crown occurred. The jumper was a young man, only 22. There had been an unsuccessful attempt 3 years prior by a distraught Russian immigrant man facing deportation. Big attention was given to the June 1929 suicide of Barbara Cole (a possible alias or stage name for Donna Barron). The jilted British showgirl’s suicide made headlines across the United States, from Chicago, New York to small town America. It made for good copy with a seedy love affair, the lover’s rejection, a prominent stockbroker, a Ziegfeld Follies girl, and an added special cherry on top the ex-wife of a Biddle. The Biddles are a prominent Philadelphia family, and two Biddle siblings married Doris Duke’s two first cousins Mary Duke and her brother Angier, the one whose drowning caused Doris’s father Buck to change his will. The noted tobacco affiliation came from Doris’s family as the Biddle family business was banking.
13:18
Another recurring theme is the showgirl / singer / actress screwing into and/or with family fortunes, which is a tale that must be as old as the theater itself. As seen both in Edna’s marriage with womanizer Franklyn Hutton as well as Buck Duke’s first marriage, wealthy lusty men gravitate towards brash and saucy artistic types. Ironically, Nanaline Duke will once again deal with a similar scandal with her son Walker’s soon to be ex-wife, to be explored in another episode.
13:50
Of course, we also have the shining star Cobina Wright, whose well publicized happy marriage is having its own problems as she tries to keep up appearances. Never forget those seemingly perfect Instagrammable lives are often fictions. Ones the players are telling themselves as much as others. Months before our story began, Cobina Wright learned of her husband’s multiple affairs, but she isn’t ready to face the truth. Ignoring the warnings of nearly all operas, she hopes their love will conquer all.
Such is our tale of money and love. Many dark turns happen whether the Dow is high or low. A broken heart is just another casualty when fortunes are at play.
14:32
[Music – Lost In A Fog by Coleman Hawkins & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics]
Section 3 – Contemporary & Personal Relevance
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14:44
This is definitely one of the more personal and timely episodes. In our current world predicament, there is a growing concern of having a spike in suicides due to complications compounded by health, isolation, and financial difficulties.
Any story covering the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression must address the subject of suicides. It’s one main theme I have been asked over and over, therefore I did a deep hard dive to uncover the truths of who, when, and where only to expose the misconceptions.
15:15
While suicide feels like an arbitrary though essential plot point, make no mistake it’s very, very personal. In fact, far too personal.
During one month in junior high, 6-8 kids within my 8th grade class attempted suicide. All were hospitalized. Amongst the rumors, one might have succeeded, but I don’t know directly. A year later, one of those classmates sat next to me in church. She pulled down her sweater sleeve after I noticed her freshly sliced wrists. Eventually, she moved away. In the first year of college, close family friends lost a son, and another former classmate attempted suicide. Fortunately, the latter is still a friend today, and we have discussed his former despair a couple of times as well as our old classmates’ situation. Today, he counsels friends in their darkest moments.
16:08
Since my brother’s death from cancer, I relate deeply to any similar loss. For me, death is never merely a plot point – that wouldn’t do justice to the myriad of complexities behind the ongoing grief from which I suffered for nearly a decade afterwards.
I too have suffered from two very long bouts of deep, dark depression. The pain is suffocating. Both times the only thing that kept me from doing something drastic was not wanting to cause pain to those I love. In my first spell, it was my brother who died and my still lifelong best friend. Not my parents as their divorce was causing a lot of my pain at that time. The second bout happened as my marriage unraveled in the maddening haze of a secret drug addiction, then it was my parents whom I could not bear to suffer losing another child. Though in my darkest survivor’s guilt, I often feel like the wrong child was lost, but I know the reverse would have been just as an unbearable.
17:09
Yet without a doubt to all that know me, I have strong coping skills, but still nothing could fully prepare me for what happened in the middle of developing this tale.
One summer not too long ago, I lost 2 people I loved very much within a very short period of time, one from a longterm illness and the other from suicide. One was a nearly 7 year long goodbye, and the other I only had a couple weeks warning he might be in such a state. When I finally got him on the phone, I opened up about my own moments of despair and offered for him to stay with me to help clear his head. He assured me he would get better. He didn’t.
What can I say about losing someone whom I loved for a whole lifetime?
17:58
My grief was compounded by the double loss. It took me nearly two years to overcome the violent shock and pain that ripped through my heart.
18:08
I’m saying all this to reach out —
To those deeply depressed. Please find your way through it, the darkness and pain can eventually go away. Happier times will come. I know I’ve been there.
For those surviving any loss, your pain and grief might take some time. You will cycle multiple times through many emotions – anger, sadness, relief, guilt, fear,.. and possibly get stuck on one or two. That’s okay. There is no way but through the process.
18:43
I don’t know what circumstances you are facing today, but I wish you well and a light at the end of the tunnel. I say this with all sincerity, as I pulled out of my last despair I found these stories. From my pain, I’m trying to create beauty and meaning.
I always say this is the story I’m building out of my broken heart and broken dreams.
May life brings us happiness and love, but we must be here to experience them. When they finally do come, revel in and cherish them. I know the fear is losing it all again.
That is when we must all be brave and try and try and try again.
Hook
19:29
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
Next when we return to AS THE MONEY BURNS…
An heir to two fortunes is back on the market. Which lucky heiress will win his heart?
Until then…
Credits
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast written, produced, and voiced by Nicki Woodard, based on historical research. Archival music has been provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, check out their website at www.pastperfect.com.
19:59
THE END