Owen Kildare (part 3)

With his death, more stories of Kildare's activities came to light. He reputedly had served in the Brazilian Revolution as Captain of Marines [in 1891-92] and as a Sergeant of the Legion des Etrangeres in Venezuela against President Castro; during the latter [1901] he was captured and sentenced to be hanged, cheating his executioners by escaping. These escapades escaped his memory whilst writing My Mamie Rose and were never mentioned in other early writings or during early interviews.

More believable was a series of remembrances that were published in the New York Times shortly after his burial under the headline "The Bowery Mourns For Owen Kildare". This contained another twist to the Kildare story in its claim that Kildare was not the author's real name, but it does offer some insight into the kind of man he was, quoting friends from his early days in the Bowery.

"He was on de level. He never forgot a friend or turned his back on a stranger wot needed a stake. He could lick three cops at once, but a woman could make him jump t'rough an' play dead. He knowed the Bowery, an' he knowed wot it was to want a drink an' not have de price. But when he pulled hisself up an' outer this place, he didn't forget to come down once in a while to see his old pals an' stake them as needed it."
    Such tributes as this are the Bowery's to Owen Kildare, who died the other day. The real Bowery is not a place where one would seek to find sentiment; least of all would one look for it in No.10, known as "the Doctor's place" to the derelicts who drift up and down. Like his "patients" "the Doctor's place" is not nice to look at. Indeed it is an offense to at least four of the five senses. Its ceiling is low and stained with the smoke of years; its floor is worn until through the begrimed sawdust the knots stand up like stones in a sand pile. Along the right side as one enters runs the bar and here the derelicts anchor, waiting, Micawber-like, for the something which for them never turns up, until the tide sooner or later, but surely, carries them out.

In "the Doctor's place" they remember Owen Kildare kindly," the article continues. But it was not as Owen Kildare but as Tom Carroll they knew him. Some claimed he was related to a famous family of Carrollton, Maryland, and, instead of being born in an east side tenement, he first saw the light on the western shore of Maryland. "But, Kildare or Carroll, it was as Kildare that all but the more ancient of Bowery mariners knew him, and as Kildare he will be remembered there."

"Did I know Owney Kildare? Did I?" "Red" Shaughnessy draped himself over the Doctor's bar and called for a "slug" to burn the cobwebs from his befogged memory. "I knowed Owen Kildare when he was Tom Carroll. He licked me when I was seven years old, right here at Doyers Street corner. After dat we wuz pals an' we stuck togedder on an' off f'r twenty year.
    "At dat time we wuz sellin' poipers down t' Fulton Ferry, an' sometimes t' Catherine Ferry. Dere warn't no Brooklyn Bridges in dem days, an' a kid cu'd make a dollar a day, and have a coupla hours fer a swim in de river. We useter swim from de footer Peck Slip, an' Tom, or Oweny, he was de bes' swimmer of de gang.
    "I remember one Winter day a little goil—Mamie McGloin, she wuz—fell overboard off de ferryboat as she wuz in de slip. Tom heerd a yell, an' he drops his poipers and jumps in de river after her. De slip wus full of ice, but Tom, he dives an' brings her up fin'ly. She wus near dead, an' he wus near froze, but de passengers wot seen it staked him t' fi' dollars f'r de poipers he lost.
    "De gang wus f'r having a good time wid de fiver, but it wus nuthin' doin'. Tom hol's out a quarter f'r poipers, an' toins d' rest of it over t' Mamie's mudder."

Others who told stories about Carroll / Kildare were "Chuck" Conners, who related how Carroll "licked" a pal of Conners' named "Skinny" McCarthy because he insulted a woman in the street.

"Dat," said Mr. Conners, "wus de dame he writ de book about. He give me de book wid his name writ in it.
    "When he begins ritin' f'r de poipers he quits de Bow'ry, but he never f'rgits it. He useter come down here reg'lar an' he'd allus stake any wot wus broke. After dat dame pikes out Owney he wus near daffy. He comes back here f'r a while, but it wus all off. He keeps on writin' f'r de poipers an' den de foist t'ing we knows he gits stuck on anudder dame an' gits spliced up.
    "Youse won't find many saints down here, but I takes me top off t' Kildare. He wus on de level an' a guy wot's on de level d'soives all he gits an' den some."

While there's little evidence for any of this. The 1900 US census includes a watchman named Thomas Carroll, born in June 1864 in New York, and then living in the County of Marbalow, New York, with his wife Maggie and three children, but there is no evidence that this is the Tom Carroll later known as Owen Kildare.

It was under the name Owen Kildare that he was to be found in the 1910 census, an inmate of  Manhattan State Hospital, aged 46. Leita Kildare is to be found in the New York City Directory that year living at Room 500, 939 8th Avenue. Kildare is listed as married when the census was taken on 15 April; Leita Kildare then marries Charles A. Adams the following month.

Charles and Leita Adams were later divorced. The date is uncertain, but I have found a brief reference that might throw some light on it: according to the Oakland Tribune, 31 January 1913, "Leita Russell was awarded a final decree from Charles A. Russell on the grounds of desertion."

Leita Adams reverted to being known as Mrs. Owen Kildare and lived at 570 Webster Avenue, New Rochelle. She appears as Leita (Gildare (sic)) Adams (30) in the 1920 census, married and living with her daughter, Lowen Kaldare (12) and Frances W. Clinton, the 50-year-old president of a hat company, listed as her cousin.

Francis Wright Clinton was born in London on 6 December 1867, the son of Henry Clinton, a hatter who moved to Brooklyn with his wife Flora and family in 1868. Francis followed in his father's footsteps and around the turn of the century was running a hat store in Manhattan. He was married to Edgaretta Olcott in 1898 and had two children, Edgar Olcott Baile Clinton in 1891 and Francis Wright Clinton Jr. in 1899.

He probably met Mrs. Kildare, then a leading light in the Women's Press Club of New York City and a campaigner for suffrage and food conservation, during the teens of the century and may have been living with her in New Rochelle as early as 1917; he was listed as sharing her residence in 1920 and seemingly remained with her until his death on 17 June 1929, aged 62.

Clinton was president of the Danbury Hat Company and had considerable wealth, which he willed the bulk of his estate, valued between $150-200,000, to his wife and Francis Jr—Edgar having died whilst serving in the military in France only days after the end of the Great War. Both Mrs. Leita Adams, described as a "friend", and her daughter, were give $5,000 each, the latter also receiving the testator's library, furniture, paintings and other effects in his apartment at 2,040 Seventh Avenue.

Lowena Kildare had married H. Elliot Christman in 1928 and they remained living with their mother in New Rochelle until after the Second World War. Their son, Peter, was born in 1931.

Mrs. Owen Kildare, as she continued to be known,  continued to be active in a variety of clubs and causes. In 1921, she was said to have been active in 47; forty years later, in 1963, she was a member of 57, over the years holding offices in many of them. She had, for many years, run the Kildare Institute for Personality Development from 205 West 57th Street in Manhattan, which advertised itself widely with such headlines as "Put PUNCH in Your SPEECH" "Be a Personality!"

Speech is the American weapon. CONQUER in business and social affairs through Your Effective Speech. COMMAND in the march of life! WIN personal victories by mastering the method of attraction. 12 easy lessons in your own home, free from embarrassment while learning. These lessons have been prepared for YOU by an author-lecturer, an authority on Personality Development. Write for information.

Mrs Kildare was also a pioneer radio broadcaster and hosted interviews with personalities on her programmes "Personality Period" and "Radio Vues". A lecturer for the National Association of Manufacturers and a delegate at conventions of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, she was an ardent Republican and conservative, delivering 14 quarter-hour radio talks on stations throughout the East on "A Radio-Revue of Herbert Hoover, America's Emergency Man," during 1928. Representative John Q. Tilson called her presentation of Hoover's life "one of the most brilliant I have heard."

As well as her support for women's suffrage and the National Woman's Party, Mrs. Kildare was also the co-founder of the American Dress League, which called for the end to sexy, stylish clothes, replacing them with a drab, universal uniform that would only be abandoned when it wore out. The uniform of a blouse, knickerbockers and slipover achieved a brief vogue in the early 1920s.

Her hobby of collecting fans, of which she had 400, was the source of a number of lecture tours and shows. One prize example was a fan made by Benveuto Cellini for Catherine the Great. This, she said, was given to her by her first husband, Prince Peter Loris Poninski, who had changed his name to Owen Kildare when he came to America at the turn of the century.

Could there be any truth to this claim that appeared in Mrs. Kildare's obituary (New York Times, 23 March 1967)? There is no sign of him in travel records, but census records for Lowen Kildare in 1910, 1920 and 1930 show a curious and consistent record of her father's place of birth being Russia.

A brief biography from around 1913 mentions that she "collaborated with [her husband] in writing five books and three plays. She wrote, individually, two books and one play. Her book "Mamie Rose," which was dramatized and called by its sub-title "Regeneration," is still playing. A recent book, which she is dramatizing for Nance O'Neil to play, is "Such a Woman." Mrs. Kildaire (sic) has been dramatic critic for two New York papers and one Chicago paper. She has also edited a theatrical paper and a financial paper. (American Feminism: Key Source Documents, 1848-1920 by Janet Beer)

That Mrs. Kildare was intimately involved in the writing of the works credited to Owen Kildare is not, I think, in question. Quite how much she contributed would be interesting to know; one question that would have to be asked would be how a Russian émigré to the US could develop such an intimate knowledge of the Bowery in only a year or two.

Mrs. Kildare died  in Pawling, New York, on 22 March 1967, supposedly aged 78 years.

Owen Kildare (part 2)

Owen Kildare had written four books in quick succession, published in 1903-06; it was then five years before the fifth appeared, in which it was stated that "he became ill and was unable to continue the work. The concluding chapters were completed by Mrs. Kildare." Behind those simple words lay a tragic story.

Kildare was a regular writer of tales for newspapers and magazines, contributing to The Saturday Evening Post, Pearson's, Gunter's, The Smart Set, The Grey Goose, The Blue Mule, Cosmopolitan, People's, Red Book and the New York Times. There seemed to be no break between 1904 and 1908, after which he disappeared.

Kildare was married to Leito Kildare and the two had a daughter, Lowen Loris Margherita Kildare, born in New York on 27 November 1906.

On 1 September 1908, Kildare's play "The Regeneration" opened on Broadway. Co-written with Walter Hackett, it retold in fictional form the story of My Mamie Rose in four acts, with Arnold Daly in the role of Owen Conway and Jessie Izett as Marie Deering, the doomed lovers. Kildare had begun work on the play almost a year earlier, working closely at first with Daly. It was enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times, whose critic opined: "Judging by the many rounds of applause he [Daly] and his company received and the numerous curtain calls he was compelled to answer, he scored a success and his play bids fair to have a long run."

Not all reviews were as generous. J. Chris Westgate, in Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage, describes how some reviews were hostile to the idea of romance across the classes, quoting a review in Theatre as saying "the introduction of the element of love is fatal to the full effectiveness of the play." One reviewer went even further, saying that "The drama implies what the dramatist dare not say—that their hero will one day marry his benefactress. It at least assumes that his benefactress loved him. This implied conclusion is preposterous ... the whole scheme is false to reasonable probability and incompatible with human nature."

The play ran for only a few weeks and closed in October 1908. The following month, papers carried the news that, on November 21, Kildare had collapsed from nerves, the failure of the play being given as chief reason. According to the New York Times, an angry Mrs. Kildare, "standing in their little flat last night at 60 West 101st Street, with her hand resting on his typewriter, where he had done all his recent work, and with trembling lips and eyes dimmed with tears," she declared "a cruel injustice" had been done to her and her husband by a report that said she had had him arrested for drinking.

"I did not have him arrested," she said. "Mr. Kildare is ill because of the failure of 'The Regeneration,' which was offered early in the present season at Wallack's Theatre. It was not played as Mr. Kildare wrote it. He saw it only once and was so furious with Arnold Daly for the changes in it that he wanted to fight him. It was all we could do to keep him from attacking the actor. He became morose, morbid, and frequently talked of suicide. Finally he was attacked by the nervous collapse from which he is now suffering.
    Mr. Kildare had the present acute attack of aphasia and nervous collapse on Sunday night. He was unable to speak, and soon became unconscious. Brandy was given him, but he stayed in a stupor. On account of his great weight—nearly 250 pounds—it was impossible to carry him upstairs, so he was sent to the J. Hood Wright Hospital in an ambulance.
    "I have no idea why he was sent to the police court," said Mrs. Kildare. "But I had him sent to Bellevue because the doctors said that was the best place for him. He is bitterly opposed to going to Bloomingdale, but the physicians say he will not recover in a private sanitarium, where he can do as he pleases, so I see no help for it but for him to go there. He does not drink, except a little occasionally, and his present trouble is due solely to his worry over the failure of 'The Regeneration,' which is his dramatization of 'My Mamie Rose,' the staging, indeed, of his own sad, strange life.

Further reports revealed that Kildare had been committed to the psychopathic ward in Bellevue Hospital by Magistrate Walsh in the West Side Court. According to Dr. M. S. Gregory, a few months' rest in the sanitarium would restore Kildare's mental faculties, which, he said, were seriously deranged. He was transferred to Bloomingdale on November 30.

Little more was heard of Kildare for the next two years. On 2 January 1911, a report appeared on the front page of the Washington Post:

Many of the friends of Owen Kildare, author and playwright, who rose from bartender in a Bowery dive to be one of the most successful writers of the time, will be surprised to learn that since his incarceration in the State hospital for the insane, on Wards Island, his wife, who was the beautiful Leita Russells Bogardus, has had her marriage to him annulled, and is now the wife of Lieut. Comdr. Charles A. Adams, U.S.N., retired.
    In spite of the severing of the legal ties that bound her to Kildare and her marriage to Comdr. Adams, the young woman still retains so strong an interest in her first husband that she and her young daughter visit him every other day at the institution where he is confined. Mrs. Adams says that Owen Kildare knows of, and approves of, the course she has taken.
    Mrs. Adams declined to say when or where she married Comdr. Adams.

Where indeed? Charles Albert Adams, born in New York on 28 May 1846, had served with the Royal Navy since 1863 and had been a Commander in 1901-03 before retiring on Boxing Day, 26 December 1903.

The pair had, in fact, married in Canada—in Windsor, Ontario—on 2 May 1910, the marriage certificate stating that their reason was to avoid publicity for the marriage; a more likely reason was that the certificate described Leita Kildare as a widow, which she was most certainly not. Adams was 63, whilst Leita gave her age as 23, implying she was born in December 1886.

The New York Times later reported: "Late last year his wife, known before their marriage to magazine readers as Leita Russell, but whose full name was Leita Russell Bogartus, went to the town in Massachusetts where they had been married and obtained an annulment." (New York Times, 7 February 1911)

In 1910, Lowen Kildare was aged only 3. She was registered as a boarder with Edwin H. Bailey and his wife, Mary, in Howell Village, Livingston, Michigan. At least, this is the only Lowen Kildare to be found on the US census records whose details match what is known about Owen and Leita's daughter. One interesting detail given is that, whilst Lowen and her mother were both born in New York, her father is listed as being Russian.

Shortly after the notice about Leita Kildare Adams appeared in the Washington Post, news broke about the death of her former husband. The New York Times carried the news on its front page: "KILDARE, WRITER, DEAD OF PARESIS". "The Kipling of the Bowery" had passed away on the night of Saturday, 4 February 1911, of paresis (partial paralysis). He had been in a good condition for most of the day, which had included a visit from his former wife, with whom he had taken a long walk along the paths about the hospital; he had also walked her as far as the ferry when it came for her to leave. But, shortly before 10:30 pm, a nurse heard a groan from his room. Hurrying in, she found him in convulsions. He died in two of three minutes of the first seizure.

It was following his death that reports arose that Kildare had suffered a fall ahead of his becoming a patient in the Manhattan State Hospital on Ward's Island. Whilst some reported that his sudden collapse was ascribed to the failure of his play 'The Regeneration', others reported that he had become "violently insane three years ago after falling down the stairs at the Times Square Subway station." (Urbana Daily Courier, 7 February 1911).

Kildare had written little whilst in hospital. According to the New York Times:

Kildare took an interest in many of the patients. To some who were without family or friends to visit them, he was the only source of cheer. He often spoke of writing stories while he was on Ward's Island, and would start for his room, as if seized with the desire to put the idea on paper. He did write sometimes in a desultory fashion, the doctor's say, but the work was confused and fragmentary.

Leita Kildare Adams completed the last book Kildare had started, which became his fifth and final title. However, this was not the final surprise in the story of Owen Kildare... as we shall see tomorrow.

Owen Kildare (part 1)

Owen Kildare is a bit of a side issue to the research that I've been doing in relation to my Caught In The Act project. However, sometimes it's interesting to explore these alleyways and he fits neatly into the historic reason I wanted to set up Bear Alley in the first place: as somewhere to publish material that I fancied researching but which didn't necessarily have a place in an article or book that I was writing.

Publishing these essays also helps me get my ducks in order when the story of a writer's career proves to be complex or confusing. This is certainly the case with Owen Kildare, an American author who penned an influential autobiography at the beginning of the 20th century that predated the confessional gangster biographies that began appearing a couple of decades later. It was filmed by Raoul Walsh's as Regeneration (1915), a key early movie in what became a cycle of gangster films, which, again, Walsh helped launch with Me, Gangster (1928).

But back to Owen Kildare—or Owen Frawley Kildare to give him his full name. His autobiography, My Mamie Rose. The story of my regeneration appeared in October 1903 from The Baker & Taylor Company, 38-87 East 17th Street, Union Square North, New York. It was an instant hit, telling the story of how Kildare, a child of the Bowery, overcame poverty to become a writer; in many ways it is the predecessor of the "misery memoir" which became popular in the mid-1990s. Kildare's tragic life story was published in the UK as Up From The Slums; or, My Mamie Rose by T. Fisher Unwin in 1904.

From his autobiography we learn that Kildare was born in the Bowery District of Manhattan Island and grew up in a top floor tenement on Catharine Street, raised by Irish foster parents. His biological  parents had died: his mother in birth and his father three months earlier. His foster father, Patrick McShane, was a longshoreman between periods of "idleness" and heavy drinking; his foster mother, Mary (nee McNulty) was a housewife, struggling to keep even their small, cheap home together.

At the age of seven he left home after a scene caused by his failure to repay his foster parents for his first pair of shoes by collecting sufficient waste coal by the river. That night—it was in December—he slept in the open with another boy he had met in similar circumstances. With a borrowed five cent piece, he started as a street news-vendor in a local gang led by Timothy D. "Little Tim" Sullivan.

Being of athletic build and, by his own confession, being something of a brute, he earned a reputation as a fighter, which eventually led him to being offered opportunities in the boxing ring. He became a "floor manager" but after some years of success was caught up in attempts to clean up sporting establishments. Kildare's employer and several other were thrown into prison, and he found himself out of work, spending his idle hours sitting outside a public-house insulting passers-by.

In 1894 he met "The good angel to whose influence I owe my regeneration," a young school teacher named Marie Rose Deering whom he protected from being assaulted by a drunken friend. He gave up working in dives—over the years he progressed to become a bouncer for Fatty Flynn's, bartender at Steve Brodle's resort, manager of sporting ventures, dock labourer and freight handler—and tried to make an honest living as a baggage porter. Every day he would visit the teacher to learn how ot read, write and count. They fell in love and, eventually, they were to be married in 1900. A week before the ceremony, she died of pneumonia.

Recovering from the shock, Kildare tried to continue his "regeneration", but an accident permanently incapacitated him and the cost of operations and enforced idleness soon exhausted his savings.

He was living in an attic and working as a dishwasher for $3 a week when he discovered that the Evening Journal newspaper was offering a prize for a love story of less than 750 words; written on wrapping paper he found on the floor, the tale appeared three days after he submitted it. An autobiographical piece appeared in Sunday Press and further pieces appeared in the Sunday Herald and Sunday News. For the latter he penned a series of "Bowery Girl Sketches" which were signed "The Bowery Kipling".

A further autobiographical piece in Success Magazine led to the publication of My Mamie Rose, which was written with the help of a Leita Bogardus (sometimes given as Bogartus). Born Leita Russell in Tarrytown, on 16 December 1889, she was reputedly a precocious child, selling poems and sketches to the Detroit Free Press when she was only ten. She travelled around the world with her mother, being educated by private tutors, studying law and languages and reading extensively of medicine.

As with Owen Kildare, the known facts about Leita Russell Bogardus raise a number of questions. There is no sign of her in early census records from around the turn of the century, prior to her marriage. According to Janet Beer (American Feminism: Key Source Documents, 1848-1920), Russell—whom she calls Leita Ouida Bogardus—married at 16; however My Mamie Rose was dedicated "To L.B.K." ... and who else could it be but Leita Bogardus Kildare? If that assumption is correct, the two were already married when the book appeared in October 1903 when—if we are to believe that she was born in December 1889—Leita was 13. Perhaps not surprisingly, obituaries and other resources skip over any mention of dates.

Leita described their courtship thus: she had then recently begun writing for newspapers under the name Leita Russell when Kildare sought her aid to write his autobiography. He met her only once more before they were married. "He never even courted me," said Mrs. Kildare. "I was in the Berkshires when I received a telegram saying: 'I am coming for you. I hope you will not be angry. I have never been denied anything.'"

Not knowing what he meant, she met him at the station. He hailed a carriage and they were driven to the home of a minister and, without even asking her consent, were married. Since then, she had aided her husband on all his work.

My best shot is that she is, in fact, the New York-born actress Leita Russell, who was boarding in Buffalo at the time of the 1900 US census, who gave her birth date as December 1883. This is, I'll admit, a guess but in its favour I did find a mention that "before her first marriage Mrs. Kildare  made a considerable name in literary and stage work." [My emphasis] If I am correct, she was 19 when she married rather than 13, which sounds more plausible. Leita Russell was, shortly before the publication of My Mamie Rose, a member of the Columbia Theater stock company in 1902 where she played in such plays as "My Friend From India" and "Shall We Forgive Her"; one review commented on the "pleasing specialties" introduced between the acts, which included "Leita Russell dancing and singing popular songs."

The success of the book led to others: The Good of the Wicked and The Party Sketches (Baker & Taylor Co., Aug 1904), The Wisdom of the Simple (Fleming H. Revell Co., 1905), a novel, and My Old Balliwick (Grosset & Dunlap, 1906). The latter was a collection of essays and stories about New York tenement life from various magazines, including Pearson's, The Outlook, Success, the Saturday Evening Post, The Independent and the Christian Herald. The introduction was signed by Owen Frawley Kildare, Hartford, Conn. Kildare had also set up his own publishing enterprise based at 1451 Broadway, New York, in order to publish Letters of a Politician to His Son by John Gulick Jr., which was due for publication in July 1904 but may not have appeared.

A fifth book, Such a Woman, credited to Owen and Leita Kildare, with illustrations by Joseph C. Chase, appeared from New York publisher G. W. Dillingham Co. in 1911. In her introduction, Leita noted that "Owen Kildare was working on the manuscript of this book, in collaboration with his wife, Leita Kildare, when he became ill and was unable to continue the work. The concluding chapters were completed by Mrs. Kildare."

In fact, by the time the book was published, Owen Kildare was dead.

Which is where we'll pick up the story tomorrow.