"Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay!": A Look at Cornell Woolrich's Mexican Connection

"Ay, ay, ay, ay

Canto y no llores

(Sing and don't cry)"

--"Cielito Lindo," Mexican folksong

Cornell George Hopley Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, eleven months after his parents Genaro and Claire wed on New Year's Day at the Episcopal Church of the Archangel in Harlem. In the type of foreboding calamity that occurred with alarming frequency in Cornell's books, just a couple of months before the future author was born the church burned to the ground, leaving behind a smoldering pile of ashes.  The church's minister, the Reverend George Starkweather Pratt, could only look on in sorrow as his house of worship incinerated.  If this had been one of Cornell's notorious noir novels, it could have been called The Black Archangel.  He wrote about the the arson of a "firebug" in one of his best-known and most highly-regarded novelettes, "The Night Reveals."

For around four years after Cornell's birth the little family of father, mother and son lived together with Claire's five unmarried siblings--Estelle, Lillian, Olga, George and Irving--at the New York home of her wealthy widowed importer/exporter father, George Tarler.  However, in 1907 Genaro--a civil and metallurgical engineer who had received his advanced degree from San Francisco's Heald's Business College in 1895 and come to New York to work on the city's nascent subway system--decided that the family trio should return to Mexico, basically adopting with Claire, George Tarler's eldest child, a traditional macho "I am the man and you are the woman so what I say goes" attitude.  How proud today's manosphere would have been of him, one imagines, for taking the man's part!  

However, turnabout was fair play.  Just as Genaro didn't like living with the Tarlers in the United States, it turned out that Claire didn't like living in Mexico with his kinfolk. (Genaro had a dozen or more siblings.)  She wanted to go home to daddy.  Around 1910 she finally did just that, leaving young Cornell, not even seven years old yet, behind her.  By the time of the census taking that year she was definitely living again with her father and five siblings at the elegant Victorian Tarler townhouse on 113th Street, which had been constructed about fifteen years earlier.  Cornell was nowhere in evidence.  It was just like her marriage had never happened.  

Does this strike you as almost unfathomable today, that a woman would willingly leave her six-year-old boy--of tender years, as the legal term goes--with his father and her estranged husband, in the process for about eight years putting over 2000 miles between them?  Even the Justin Henry character in the 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer was seven when Meryl Streep's character abruptly left him in the care of her husband, played by Dustin Hoffman, in order to go find herself.  

Brighton Beach Hotel
where Cornwell Woolrich's mother in the gay nineties once tinkled the ivories for her fellow guests

It may have been the case that Claire, like some people have found the departed Mrs. Kramer from the film, was a tad flighty.  She had only an eighth grade education, though her father had provided her some training in piano, sending her to the New York conservatory of renowned virtuoso pianist and composer Xaver Scharwenka.  She participated in a musical concert at the Brighton Beach Hotel, where she was staying in 1894, when she was 19.  She was probably quite an attractive younger woman, just as Genaro was said to have been very handsome. Once she got past 30 she began lying about her age, persistently on ocean liner passenger ships knocking about a decade off the actual number.  All the better for harmless shipboard flirtations perhaps!  

In 1908, Claire started off this deception mildly, claiming to be 31 when she was in fact 34,  However, five years later, in 1908, she was actually younger, by her claim, just 30, though in fact she was nearly 40.  By 1917 she had, miraculously, aged but two years, stating that she was 32, when she was actually 43.  In 1928 she claimed to be 44 when she was 54, and in 1931 48 when she was 57.  After he published his first novel, Cover Charge, in 1926, Cornell began following his mother's suit in lying about his age, claiming that he was 19 when published the book, when he actually had been 22.  From then on he persistently claimed that his year of birth was 1906. 

son and mother, probably after he moved back to New York in 1931

It may be that Claire's only choice, given Genaro's macho attitudes, was to leave Cornell or stay there with him and suffer under the yoke of her husband's authoritarianism.  Perhaps a stronger woman would have found another way.  Or perhaps she actually bought into her husband's idea that a growing boy belonged with his father, so that the father might make a man and a proper heir of him.  In 1930 Woolrich clearly alluded to this situation in his novel mainstream A Young Man's Heart, wherein a wife who leaves her husband in Mexico City for New York is forced by him to leave their son behind with his father:

"He won't let me take you with me....I would take you to the Hippodrome and to vaudevilles.  I would buy a wristwatch for you.  Oh, how can I give you up?

....His father, it seemed, had something to say to him.

"--I'll make a man of you, what's more."

a 1930s photo pf Genaro Woolrich
unfortunately in execrable condition

Genaro and Claire's decision was not a felicitous one for their son, who grew up not only unmanly but very unhappy, neglected emotionally and, in all likelihood, physically.  For their parts Woolrich's biographer Francis Nevins and his onetime editor Lee Wright speculated four decades ago that, to the contrary, all the fault for Cornell's problems and personal failures in life lay with the author himself.  "[Y]ou said he caused his own problems," Nevins told Wright, seemingly gratified to have his own view echoed back to him. "I guess a lot of people felt like that but not too many wanted to say it, because they felt sorry for him."  

However, I believe that by his thirties Woolrich suffered from a rapidly worsening agoraphobia which developed during his neglected childhood in Mexico, and that physically he suffered from hemolytic anemia as well as,  possibly, celiac disease and the phenomenon known as failure to thrive.  To tough Genaro, a handsome, imposing ladies man, his only son and heir Cornell must have proved quite a disappointment as a potential man, as the frail youngster struggled just to get through his boyhood, being bookish, small, shy, pale and bullied by his Mexican peers.  

Cornell would not permanently depart Mexico for New York until 1917, the year the United States entered World War One, when he was thirteen years old.  (At the time, incidentally, he stood only 4'5", which today lies in the lowly third to fifth percentile for an American boy that age--evidently puberty came late to him.)  To be sure, Cornell while living in Mexico, went back, accompanied by his mother, for cherished visits to New York at least twice, in 1908 and 1913, when he was four and nine respectively.  On the 1908 trip, Claire's closest sister Lillian and her father had gone down to Mexico for a visit, taking Claire and Cornell back to New York for a time when they left.  Presumably Claire and Cornell returned to Mexico together, Claire, presumably, to stay on only for another year or two.  

All told, Cornell spent a full decade, 1907 to 1917 between the ages of three and thirteen, in Mexico.  That is a very formative period, from toddlerhood right up to the middle of middle school.  Add to this that this was the 1910s, the decade of the devastatingly chaotic Mexican revolution, a terrible time for a person to be living in Mexico.  One could say that decade made Cornell the desperately unhappy adult that he became, though his brief, miserable 1930 marriage to Gloria "Bill" Blackton did its part to finish him as well.  To use Cornellian imagery, one might say it was the final screw in the coffin.

Nor, one suspects, were the Tarlers a very healthy family by which to find oneself surrounded.  The children seem to have been very dependent on their dynamic father and at least of one of Cornell's uncles, Irving, was said to have been controlling and emotionally abusive with his own wife, who divorced him, taking custody of their adopted son.  All in all, one might say that the emotional odds were stacked hard against the Father of Noir, which helps explain how he became the Father of Noir.

Let's take more of an in-depth look at Cornell's Mexican background, something which has not really been done to this day.  

Nino Soldado (Child Soldier), Mexican Revolution, 1914
photo by Augustin Victor Casasola

The death in 1843 of Cornell's grandfather, Thomas Hopley Woolrich's father, Thomas Hall Woolrich, when Hopley, as we will call him for a bit, was just 10, left the family poorly off and Hopley around a decade later setting out adventurously from Owen Sound, Ontario--the rowdy, brothel and tavern filled port on Georgian Bay, an inlet of Lake Huron, where the Woolriches lived--to experience the perils and pleasures of the wider world.  

By 1855, a year after the conclusion between the ascendant United States and the downtrodden Mexico of the Gadsden Purchase, Hopley Woolrich, then 22, was already living in the city of Santo Domingo Tehauntepec in the state of Oaxaca doing business in the dye wood industry.  Tehauntepec was located on what was known as the Isthmus of Tehauntepec, the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean.  Before the construction of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century, the approximately 124 mile Tehauntepec Route, as it was known, was a major overland trade route.  In the 1850s, California's famed gold-hunting Forty-Niners traveled over the isthmus.  One wonders whether Hopley initially had planned himself to follow the 49ers to California and had just ended up staying in Mexico, where he found lucrative prospects to exploit.  

the Tehauntepec Route made Thomas Hopley Woolrich a rich man

During the 1850s Thomas Hopley Woolrich, or Tomas, as he was known in Mexico, was instrumental in developing the Pacific port of Salina Cruz, fifteen miles from Tehauntepec.  A 1909 article in the San Francisco Call Bulletin stated that Hopley "caused the Mexican government to declare that place a port, named it Salina Cruz, and was the first shipper from that port."  He went on to make a fortune, not to mention a lot of children: thirteen or fourteen of them by a succession of four or five wives.  Another newspaper article, this one from 1911, named him as "the oldest American [sic] resident of southern Mexico."  He had long known Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, who in 1911 was, a similarly old man, on the verge of being overthrown by rebels.  Diaz had been jefe politico (political chief) of Tehauntepec back in the 1850s and a longtime "intimate friend" of Hopley's, who insisted to the end that Diaz was a "just and honest man."

Thomas Hopley Woolrich (1833-1917)
father of Genaro and grandfather of Cornell

Genaro Woolrich was not the only one of his sons whom Hopley sent out of Mexico to be educated.  Genaro went to San Francisco, but his eldest boy Tomas Francisco and two others received educations in Hopley's native Owen Sound. Thomas Francis, as he was anglophonically known in Canada, actually in 1875 married a daughter from a prominent Owen Sound family, Amelia Brown, and produced two children with her, Lolita Lucia, who died at age 90 in 1967, a year before her cousin Cornell, and Fredrick Wallace, a Detroit businessman.  

Following the pattern of Genaro, Thomas Francis, aka Francis, an engineer like Genaro, seems to have taken his son Frederick (Federico) back with him to Mexico, where he, Francis, died in 1900 at the age of 46. Supposedly none of Thomas Hopley's children ever could long abide life outside of Mexico.  

Frederick Woolrich,
a nephew of Genaro and cousin of Cornell

Amelia Woolrich, a proper native English miss, remained back in Canada with her daughter.  In 1908 at the age of thirty Frederick Woolrich, who seems to have fared rather better in Mexico than Cornell had as a boy, married a native Mexican woman of German descent, and they returned to the States, settling not far from Owen Sound in Detroit and later retiring in Florida. Did Cornell ever meet, or even know of, any of his Canadian or American Woolrich cousins?

Thomas Francis seems to have been a manly adventurer like his father Thomas Hopley.  According to a 1932 Owen Sound newspaper account Francis once "was sent on an expedition by the British to Borneo and was captured by pirates.  He was ransomed and on his return to England was presented to the queen."  

Porfirio Diaz
dictator of Mexico for 35 years

Genaro's elder brother Carlos Jose Federico Woolrich, educated like Francis at Owen Sound, became a prominent lawyer and Porfirista, meaning a supporter of the long-lived dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz, which was overthrown after 35 years in 1911, sending him into exile in France.  Cornell's less fortunate Uncle Carlos that year was assassinated by revolutionary forces in Tehuantepec after he was appointed jefe politico of the city.  Evidently he was shot down on the way to the telegraph office shortly after his arrival.  Apparently in the deadly affray that followed his brother Alberto Carlos was killed as well.  

Thomas Hopley Woolrich fathered his first known child, Thomas Francis, in 1854 and his last, Eduardo Carlos, in 1905, when he was around 72.  He died at around 84 in 1917, leaving a large estate, including substantial legacies to some of his Canadian relatives.  One of them got the equivalent in modern dollars of $150,000,conciidentally the same amount in modern dollars that Cornell won for his novel Children of the Ritz.  Poor Cornell apparently never scooped up even a dime when Genaro died in 1948! 

Hopley's youngest daughter, Lucia Maria Hetty, Cornell's youngest aunt, was born in 1901, just two years before her nephew Cornell, and lived until 1986!  A shame no one ever interviewed her about her family.  

Cornell's cousin Carlos Burlingham, a Mexican-American child psychiatrist who was born in 1925 and died in 2004 and talked to Nevins about Genaro a few years before he died, was Hetty's son.  He lived with Genaro for a year in the 1940s and to Nevins nearly six decades later described his uncle with a powerful noirish image as "a very good-looking man with deep blue eyes....But you would never see him smile.  He had a very narrow smile."  Burlingham also said that Cornell's father was "somewhat schizoid, extremely withdrawn, extremely silent," a late riser and an all-day drinker of rum.  

Genaro's youngest sibling, his half-sister Lucia Maria Hetty Woolrich,
was just two years older than her nephew Cornell.  She died in 1986.

Between Genaro's withholding of love from his son and Claire's smothering him in it (once she finally got him back), it's a classic recipe of bad parenting, near the top of the list of don'ts, one would imagine, in the parenting manual.  "Since his babyhood, he has been the victim of nervousness," Claire helpfully volunteered to reporters in 1933, when Cornell was nearly thirty, at the height of his national embarrassment during his marriage annulment crisis, when his wife Gloria, aka Bill, announced to newspapers that he had never consummated their marriage.  How Genaro's macho lip would have curled over this revelation!

Although this is not something he would have witnessed first hand, not having been in existence at the time, Burlingham told Nevins that Cornell in Mexico once threw a great temper tantrum when he encountered Genaro in bed with another woman.  "He created a mess and became quite upset and angry," said Burlingham, :because his idea was that his father was very loyal to his mother even though they were separated."  Woolrich's frequent sentimentalism and primness about sex surely can be attributed in part to this shock he suffered.  A child of a broken marriage not unnaturally idealizes marriage.  Even in the 1920s, after all he had been through, Cornell talked wistfully about his father returning to be with him and his mother someday.  

political broadside 1911

Possibly around two million people died in Mexico during the Revolution, which, after dictator President Diaz was overthrown in 1911, devolved, really, into more of a civil war, a confusing mess of evolving factions and Machiavellian plots and counterplots.  Woolrich himself wrote of towns he lived in  constantly changing hands and of walking over piles of spent gun cartridge shells.  In his short fiction set in Mexico he invariably portrays revolutionaries negatively, in this reflecting the privileged Porfirista background of his father's family, which had a huge stake in the status quo.  

Woolrich viewed Mexico on the whole sardonically and negatively.  Pale, auburn-haired, frail and emphatically a gringo despite his quarter-Mexican heritage, he never fit in there.  He recalled as a schoolboy being pursued by rock-throwing Mexican boys after the United States invaded Mexico in 1916, sending troops under General Pershing in vain pursuit of wily rebel leader Pancho Villa.  For a time full-scale war between the two countries seemed not unlikely.  Germany meddled behind the scenes to promote conflict, in order to distract the United States from entering the Great War on the allied side. 

Cornell said that the vengeful Mexican schoolboys, denouncing him as a gringo, in Biblical fashion actually hit him with their little stony missiles, drawing from him blood:  "I was often chased home from school by the Mexican kids when Pershing crossed the Rio Grande after Villa.  They laid down a barrage of rocks.  I remember once when I was hit and the blood got in my eyes so I could hardly see where I was going. I had plenty of fistfights too on my hands.  I didn't get much schooling." 

One surmises that the response to his 12-year-old son from Genaro, who saw two of his brothers murdered in 1911, likely was: "Well, and what do you want from me?  Stand up for yourself!" Supposedly Cornell resorted instead to financial chicanery, from his pocket money paying another, bigger Mexican boy to let him beat him in a fight, in order to impress his father.  One suspects that Genaro was not fooled.  

This story came from a Sixties friend of Cornell's, Lou Ellen Davis, who told Nevins (she had sympathy for Woolrich): "Here was this skinny, frail, very gifted, very artistic kid, and here was this macho guy, and the kid so wanted macho approval."

It seems that Cornell had no real friends in Mexico.  "I lived in hotels a lot and went years before meeting others boys," he sadly recalled.  "I associated with grown-ups.  That had its effect."  

Cornell also recalled Genaro, much to his mother's consternation, took him to bullfights, where he was appalled at the goring of the horses, doubtlessly all good fun to Genaro.  In contrast with Mexico, New York City seemed an enchanted, magical place to him.  "I wanted to come up here awfully bad," he recalled. "I was happy just walking down Broadway and staring in at the shop windows."  Did Claire ever get him a wristwatch?

In a 1927, after he prestigiously won the $10,000 literary prize for his novel Children of the Ritz, beating out thousands of other manuscripts and scoring a Hollywood movie deal in the process, Woolrich reflected a bit on his Mexican youth to a magazine, speaking in the obligatory flippant, smart patter of a Jazz Age college prodigy, a follower of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 

I was twenty-one last December, which means I was born in 1906--for no good purpose.  Most likely I was God's gift to the Gibson girl, only the Gibson girl didn't know it.  I was a baby for some time, before I finally began to get ideas of my own.  One of those ideas had to do with my hair.  I didn't like the way it was cut.  I wanted a boy's cut or I wouldn't play.  It was my hair and I was going to do what I wanted with it.  To cure me, they took me down to Mexico, where haircuts are haircuts (witness the Chihuahua species).  I was eight when I got there, and I saw bullfights, jumping beans and the marines in Veracruz.  When the marines went home I forgot my slang and picked up Spanish instead.  

From Mexico I went to Havana, where I used to see an American dime once in a while, and our fifth Avenue buses on the Prado (with American advertisements still inside the racks).  You'd be surprised how slick those buses can look when you've been away for ages.  When I left Havana I hit the Bahamas but not too hard--they bruise so easily.  I stayed there till I couldn't look a grapefruit in the face.  Finally I came home (it was about time to get educated I suppose) and had to switch languages again.  I entered Columbia [University] in 1922.

Cornell hated the idea of his father
running round with Mexican women
and being unfaithful to his mother.

The American occupation of Veracruz took place in 1914, during most of which year Cornell was actually, even going by his own falsely claimed birth year of 1906, seven not eight, but Cornell was always forgetting that he was born very late in the year.  He also implies that he was multilingual, having learned to speak Spanish.  

I don't recall this point ever being discussed by Woolrich writers, but it would seem, surely, to make sense that he could. But then Cornell seemed to want to forget Mexico as much as possible.  "I'm glad I'm out of it down there," he told a newspaper in 1927.  "I don't care much for that kind of life."  

Mexico survives in Woolrich's fiction as a decidedly unappealing and forbidding place, either one of ghastly mystic horror (his supernatural fiction) or of casual cruelty, brutality, corruption and death (his crime fiction).  But then is his fictional New York so very different from that after all?  Cornell learned in Mexico to look at life pessimistically, and ultimately the United States reinforced his painful Mexican lesson.  

One final note.  Genaro, though not as prolific of children as his father, did marry again in the 1920s (though he and Claire had never divorced), to an Esperanza Pinon, and by her produce two daughters, Maria and Adela Hopley.  

trying to keep the demons from the door

Born in 1901, Esperanza was 26 years younger than Genaro and barely older than his son Cornell.  Esperanza died three years before Genaro, in 1945.  Tragically Adela Hopley Woolrich, their younger daughter, did not survive infancy, being born in 1933, the year of Cornell's marriage annulment disgrace, and dying in 1934, the year in which Cornell published his first crime fiction.  Of Maria, on the other hand. all I know is that she was born in 1927.  And this below.

A Sixties friend of Woolrich's, Lou Ellen Davis again, told Nevins that Woolrich told her that in 1961 he, Woolrich, had received a letter from a woman informing him that she was his surviving half-sister from Genaro's second marriage.  After this revelation Woolrich legally changed his name to his pseudonym William Irish, in order, speculates Nevins, to make it harder for this upstart 34-year-old woman, his sister though she easily was young enough to be his daughter, to "look him up and try to enter his life."  

Did Cornell feel that he was being pursued by his sister, like he had been hounded nearly three decades earlier by his scheming wife Gloria Blackton?  According to Davis' account, Woolrich wanted nothing to do with the product of his father's adulterous union with a much younger Mexican woman, his perfidious tropical betrayal of Claire.  He wanted nothing to do with Maria Woolrich.  When he died seven years later she was left nothing in his will.  (Nor were any of his surviving relatives, on either side of the family; instead he created an endowment in the name of his mother at his alma mater, Columbia University.) 

So what happened, then, to Genaro's daughter and Cornell's half-sister Maria Woolrich?  She would be nearly 100 if she were alive today.

Cosmopolitan Recluse: Cornel's Woolrich's Globe Spanning Ancestry Part One: Oh, Canada!

For someone who spent over thirty-five years living in New York apartment hotels and increasingly not getting out much (in his last years he seldom ventured beyond the hotel lobby), Cornell Woolrich had a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry.  His father Jorge Rodolfo Genaro Hopley Woolrich Sandoval was half-Mexican and half-Canadian; his mother Claire Attalie Tarler was, through her father's side, half-Judeo-Russian.  (Her mother Sarah "Sadie" Viola Cornell's supposed old New York Dutch Cornell ancestry has never really been established.)  

Cornell's dynamic grandfathers, native Canadian Thomas Hopley Woolrich and native Judeo-Russian George Abraham (Gyorgi Avraam) Tarler, traveled all over the world in the import/export business and accumulated heaps of money.  Cornell was born in New York City, in 1903 but his native Mexican father Genaro, a civil and mining engineer who hated life in New York at his father-in-law's house, which was packed to the rafters with members of the Tarler clan, returned to Mexico, at his behest, with his wife Claire and their son around 1907.  

dressed to kill
Cornell Woolrich's
gr-gr-gf James Henry Woolrich (1762-1823)
a Canadian merchant and land speculator

Claire apparently stuck it out in Mexico with Genaro for a couple of years, but by 1910 she had returned alone to her father's house in New York, leaving Cornell in Genaro's simultaneously authoritarian and neglectful care. Until Claire finally returned to Mexico to take her boy back to New York with her in 1917, Cornell was pulled back and forth between the two places by his estranged parents.  

Left with his father between roughly 1909 and 1917 as a child, preteen and young teenager (the years 6-14), Cornell was dragged along with Genaro around Mexico to Texas and Louisiana and to Cuba and other islands of the Caribbean, though when these destinations were reached, he was mostly left dumped alone in hotels.  

In 1913, when he was nine, Cornell made at least one trip back to New York, shepherded on ship by his mother, to serve as pageboy at his mother's sister Lillian's wedding to native Scotsman Archibald Cowan Macbain.  

Two years earlier in 1911 his Aunt Estelle had married a native Cuban, Emilio Garcia, but we don't know whether Cornell made it back for that big event.  He spent most of the 1910s, a very turbulent decade indeed for Mexico, making do as he could in his father's war-torn native land.  

Once he returned to New York in 1917 to live permanently with his mother and desultorily to attend Columbia University, Cornell stayed put there for a decade; but in 1927 he made his big flit to California to work in the LA film industry.  After his disastrous three-week marriage to Gloria "Bill" Blackton, he fled back to New York in 1931 to his mother, who at least took him on a recuperative trip to Europe, including Paris, the fabulous City of Light.  

bearding the world
Cornell's grandfather
Thomas Hopley Woolrich (1833-1917)
who left Canada, traveled the world and
became a wealthy importer/exporter
in Mexico

After publishing his poor-selling mainstream novel Manhattan Love Song in 1932 and failing to find a publisher for his latest work, a frothier, simple love story called I Love You, Paris, Cornell in 1933 moved in with his mother at her apartment at the Hotel Marseilles.  She herself, along with her widowed sister Lillian Macbain and Lillian's son Archie, had recently had to vacate her late father's house, her other siblings--who, in addition to Estelle Garcia, were divorced youngest sister Olga Leclair and two married brothers, George and Irving--having wanted to sell.)

Cornell was desperate. Over the last six years he had spent all of the contest prize money--$10,000, about $150, 000 in modern worth--that he had won for his second novel Children of the Ritz, while the slick magazine market for his romantic short fiction had dried up. 

Making 1933 an even worse year, Cornell was nationally humiliated when his wife Gloria, coming to New York to launch a stage career, to much publicity brought an annulment suit against him, alleging in the newspapers that her unsatisfactory husband, who "loved her to well to kiss her," had never consummated the marriage.  

Now past thirty, and deeming himself an utter failure, the onetime Jazz Age college literary prodigy holed up in his mother's apartment and reinvented himself as a pulp crime writer.  This would be his existence for the next thirty years.  He later wrote that he knew nothing of the real world and had lived mostly isolated from other people and from real life in a succession of dreary hotel rooms.  

How different were the lives of Cornell's hard-driving, experience-grabbing, self-made, globetrotting, cosmopolitan Victorian trader grandfathers!  My focus here is going to be on the Woolrich side of the family, about which very little has ever been discussed.  

*******

Francis Nevins doesn't say much specific about Cornell's father Genaro and nothing at all about Genaro's ancestors in his 1988 biography of the crime writer, though not long before he passed away, Cornell's' much younger cousin, Carlos Eduardo Roldolfo Burlingham, who died at nearly ninety in 2004, provided some information about the Woolrich family, as did a distant Canadian cousin of Cornell, Peter Woolrich.  Nevins wrote about this in his introduction to the 2010 reprint of Cornell's fourth mainstream novel, A Young Man's Heart (1930).  But there's a great deal more about it below.  Buckle up!

derelict Calveley Hall, once owned in the early nineteenth century by Hopley Woolrich

Cornell's Woolrich forebears go back, unsurprisingly, to England, ending up in Mexico by way of Canada.  A John Woolwich and a James Woolwich, his son, go back to the tiny village of Sandon in Staffordshire.  James' son, James Henry Woolwich, the Canadian immigrant, was apparently from Yorkshire.  Likely the family was connected to the Woolriches of Calveley Hall, in Milton Green, Cheshire, about forty miles to the east of Sandon, Staffordshire.  The two villages are ringed by the sprawling West Midlands industrial cities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield.  A Hopley Woolrich of Calveley Hall left an 1809 will naming sons John, George and Hopley.  Given the importantceof the surname Hopley to Cornell--it was one of his father's and grandfather's names and part of his pen name George Hopley--it seems safe to assume there was a family connection between the two sets of Woolriches.

All Saints Church, Sandon, Staffordshire, where Woolriches lie buried

In any event James Henry Woolwich (1762-1823) left England for Canada sometime after the American Revolution and settled in Montreal where he became a wealthy dry goods merchant and "land baron."  Though an Anglican, he married a Catholic, Paula Magdaleine Romaine Gamelin (1765-1846), and the couple in a compromising move concluded to raise their sons as protestants and their daughters as Catholics.  

After he died, only about age 61, in 1823, his protestant son Thomas Hall Woolrich (1802-1843) settled the estate, which was awarded to his mother, Madeleine.  Thomas was a bookkeeper, a "gentleman of good education and ability," who served as a captain in the volunteer militia during the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1838-39.  He participated in the defeat of the rebel Patriotes at the Battle of Odelltown in November 1839 but suffered exposure and eventually died from consumption, leaving his his family, it is said, destitute.  (Why didn't Magdaleine fork over something?)  

Thomas' widow, Mahetable (Mehitabel) Shaw (1794-1876), who was eight years older than he, was the daughter and granddaughter of Isaiah and Moses Shaw, respectively.  Moses was a New York City British loyalist during the American Revolution who with his family left the traitorous American colonies, like many other British Americans, for Canada. The Shaws, as the name Mahetable suggests, were an old Puritan fanily, going back to the Plymouth Colony in 1632.

Giving an indication of the social significance of the Woolrich family, a daughter of James Henry Woolrich, Thomas' sister Julia, in 1831 married her second cousin William Connolly, a fur trader with the Hudson Bay Company who was in charge of the British Columbia sector of the business.  Accompanied by her husband Julia was said to have been "one of the first white women to reach the Pacific ocean by land."  In marrying Julia Woolrich Connolly thereby repudiated his native American Cree wife of 28 years, by whom he had had six children, including Suzanne, who became Lady Douglas, wife of Sir James Douglas, governor of Vancouver Island and British Columbia.  After his death one of his half-Cree sons successfully sued his father's estate, establishing legal recognition of these "mixed" marriages.  

This connection of Woolriches to British Columbia interested me, because after his mother's death in 1957, Cornell Woolrich four years later took a trip out to--where?--the state of Washington and the province of British Columbia! This was sort of an incredible development for Cornell, not just a trip, but a trip across the continent and to another country.  As far as we know he hadn't done anything like this in over a quarter of a century.  What exactly did he know about his own Canadian family connections?  Certainly he must have known about the name "Hopley," as he used it for his pen name George Hopley.  We'll get more into this next time, as we follow his grandfather Thomas Hopley Woolrich's path from Canada to Mexico.  

signed Hopley Woolrich

Some Cornell Woolrich Book News (Silent as the Grave is out) and Some Thoughts on a Few Woolrich Stories

Silent as the Grave, publisher Centipede's latest edition of Cornell Woolrich short fiction, is available now.  I wrote a substantial introduction for this volume and was able to get a few particular favorite stories in here, including "Dime a Dance" and "Two Fellows in a Furnished Room."  Another one I particularly love, "Mystery in Room 913, "aka "The Room with Something Wrong," was not able to be included on account of space limitation, but it will be in the next volume. 

This collection opens with Woolrich's autobiographical essay "Even God Felt the Depression" and my intro is title "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime Detective?," so you will get the theme of the collection. I thought it might be nice for a change to place analytical emphasis on something other than the question of the author's sexuality.  

I'm hoping  the next volume of Woolrich short crime fiction from Centipede will take not so long as this one did (three years).  I ain't getting any younger!  In the meantime, here are some reflections from me on some of my recent Cornell Woolrich short fiction reads (and rereads).  

Two of these tales, the short story "Humming Bird Goes Home" (Pocket Detective, March 1937) and the novelette "If I Should Die Before I Wake" (Detective Fiction Weekly, July 1937), in 1952 were made into films by Argentinian director Carlos Hugo Christensen, the former as a duo with an adaptation (more like an amplification) of Woolrich's short story "Somebody on the Phone" in the film Never Open the Door.  

"Phone" is really more of a sketch or anecdote tale with a kicker of an original ending that appeared in at least one Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, so the film version must have amplified it considerably.  However there is enough in "Humming Bird" and certainly "Wake" to make longer films without having to add a lot of new material.  

"Feelin' tomorrow like I do today

If I'm Feelin' tomorrow like I do today

I'll pack my trunk and make my getaway."

--"St. Louis Blues"

"Five years was a long time to be alone in the dark."

Never Open That Door

"Humming Bird Comes Home"--in the Bluebeard's Seventh Wife collection the "the" is dropped--is about a vicious city gangster, nicknamed "Humming Bird" because on a job he always hums St. Louis Blues, who returns home to his blind mother in the countryside to hide out after a deadly heist. It is, I think, one of Woolrich's most successful and moving crime tales.  

It's only about 4500 words or less and really has only four characters of any significance (two leads and two supporting, as it were) but it manages to generate some considerable excitement in its depiction of the final confrontation between mother and son, and it has a memorable conclusion.  Inevitably one uses a word like poignant.

As an aside, I simply must quote another great moment in misguided homophobic Francis Nevins Cornell Woolrich literary criticism here.  Nevins, naturally enough, sees this tale, which he terms "haunting," as all about the author's supposed status as a "self-hating homosexual," asking rhetorically: 

Are we to see the gangster son as a stand-in for Woolrich himself, giving form to the self-contempt that sprang from his homosexuality and physical weakness and his career in the lowly pulps, verbalizing his fear that his beloved mother was ashamed of him? 

To which I say: Oh, please, girl!  I don't know that his mother minded at all about Cornell making his mom his best friend, as it were.  ("A man's best friend is his mother," to quote Norman Bates.)  She seems to have liked having him dependent on her and she wasn't ashamed of him in later years; to the contrary, she adored him.  Even if Cornell had been gay and the two of them had ever discussed his sexuality together, which really doesn't seem very likely, why would Woolrich liken being gay unto being a vicious killer?  It's only in Nevins-land, where homosexuality is one of the most benighted states of being on this earth, that that these comparison makes sense.

"Here, little girl, you want some candy?"

"Next day Millie finally broke her record.  She didn't come to school all day....We never saw Millie again."

If I Should Die Before I Wake

"If I Should Die Before I Wake" is one of of Woolrich's classic crime tales--one of his very best--with a child protagonist.  All of his life Woolrich identified with the weak and powerless, and frequently few are more weak and powerless than a young child.  Bullied as a "gringo" adolescent in Mexico, where he had been left in his father's negligent company by his feckless, self-centered mother, Woolrich had a keen perception of the vulnerabilities of youth.  

"Wake" is narrated by "going on twelve" Tommy Lee--not the future Motley Crue drummer, of course--and what a tale he has to tell us. It starts in flashback, back when Tommy was nine, and a girl classmate of his, Mollie Adams, suddenly disappeared one day.  

Woolrich tells this story obliquely, through Tommy's naive perception, so we realize what he doesn't, which is that Mollie was murdered, and quite horrifically, by a strange man who tempted her to a house in the woods with the lure of lollipops--the plump, delicious, luxurious nickel kind, not the cheap, spindly, one-cent dumdum. 

Tommy gives a charming, albeit poignant, depiction of how tempting lollipops were to the kinder in those days.  The treats had only been invented in 1908, so they would have been brand new when Woolrich, born in 1903, was growing up.  "By the 1920s and 1930s," Sparkosweets tells us, "lollipop brands we recognize today were coming to life," including the Tootsie Pop and the fabulous All-Day Sucker.  

The strange man who had befriended Mollie seemingly has stashed away for kids--little girls, specifically--a veritable smorgasbord of suckers. First he gives ingenuous little Mollie her a lime lollipop, then an orange, and the next day he temptingly promises her a cinnamon one.  

Mollie generously shares the first two pops with Tommy--they lick them in turn, which I admit kind of disgusted me--and Tommy boyishly pronounces each one successively his favorite flavor. One really gets to feel how pieces of sugar candy could be such a big deal to these poor Depression-era kiddos. But Tommy never gets his tantalizing taste of cinnamon because Mollie vanishes. 

When I was growing up as a child in Alabama in the Seventies, we were allowed to wander on our bikes all over our extended neighborhood subdivision, full of woods and hills and a lake, our parents never having any idea where we actually were. Pretty much, in my case, from the age of about seven as I recollect.  But of course we were always told "Don't talk to strangers" and "Don't take a ride in a strange car."  A stranger, however ingratiating and persuasive, might well be worse even than some fairy tale monster, his geniality disguising his desire to do bad things to you for some reason.  

My Dad in the late Thirties around the age of nine was allowed to take a bus alone to a neighboring town to see Son of Frankenstein.  He missed the bus on the way back and to reach his homeward destination had to walk several miles in the dark, like Tommy Lee in this story, absolutely terrified of what might be lurking in the shadows. 

I didn't have much of a thing for lollipops per se, though I was crazy for something called "clear toy pops" from a mall store in Birmingham and then quite liked Tootsie Pops, on account of the famous chewy center.  But I never accepted candy from strangers, unless it was on Halloween.  Then we were told to look out for razor blades.  

Anyway, I think you can get the sort of Ray Bradbury-ish whimsy here, but it's coupled with real horror.  It becomes pretty clear that Mollie was not just sexually molested and murdered but also mutilated after death. This is all presented obliquely--and sexual assault is never referred to directly--but it seems pretty bold for a Thirties pulp tale.   

Well, Mollie and the mysterious candy man are forgotten and the killer is never caught, but three years after her death Tommy has made another little girl friend, Jeanie Myers, and Tommy learns one day that a strange man has been giving her lollipops--lime and orange, with the promise of cinnamon....*

*(Cinnamon, incidentally, has long had a sexual, aphrodisiacal connotation and I imagine Woolrich was aware of this.)    

Then, you guessed it, Jeanie disappears and when childish Tommy finally connects the dots in his head no one--not his grouchy, middle-aged, spinsterish teacher nor his mother nor his stern police detective dad--will listen to the story he tries to tell them.  So it's up to him, at grave peril to his own life, to find the house of lollipops in the wood--like the witch's gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel--and rescue Jeanie, who he is sure is now in the clutches of the sinister lollipop man....The murderer announces, "I don't like little boys much," but he likely won't mind killing one.*

*(Incidentally, here's the perverse way Nevins "homosexual contempt" criticism of Woolrich runs: if Cornell's male characters don't show interest in women, he shouts "GAY!"--actually "Homosexual" since he won't use the word gay--but if they do show interest in women he says Woolrich is trying "to make sure we won't think he's homosexual."  This is a literal quotation from the biographer's analysis of the author's late novel Death Is My Dancing Partner.  Poor Con just can't catch a break from his biographer here.)

"A clue is any little thing that don't seem to belong where it's found."

I'm not surprised "Wake" was filmed; it's one of Woolrich's best tales.  In America in 1951 the 1931 child murderer film M was remade, with David Wayne, television's future Inspector Queen (aka Ellery's Dad) taking the notorious Peter Lorre role, but apparently it took Argentina bravely to take on Woolrich's child molester and murderer tale.  

Two years after "Wake" was originally published in 1937, Woolrich in Black Mask published a variation on it, "Through a Dead Man's Eye."  It's a very good story too, but it's almost the same story, shorn of the chivalrous element (no little girls in grave peril).  There's a 12-year-old boy, his 35-year-old police detective father, a cute childish bit ("swapping" instead of lollipops) and, yes, peril at a lonely house out in the country.  

The boy in this tale, Frankie--a plucky reader of Black Mask, where the story was published (nice meta touch, that)--is actually a much better detective than Tommy, who, while basically goodhearted, isn't exactly aces in the brains department, even considering his age. 

Frankie, on the other hand, is one bold young chap, at one point shouting at the murderer, whom he is facing down all alone in a night dark house: "You can kill me like you did him, but I'm not afraid of you.  My pop and every cop in the city'll get even on you, you dirty murderer, you.  You stink!"  Quite a show of bravado, if a bit unlikely.  

"Eye" is a perfectly valid tale and quite good in its own right, but its imitativeness is too readily apparent.  It also lacks the fantastical and genuinely horrific elements in "Wake," which not inappositely quotes this plaintive, rather morbid children's prayer, which sadly so many cruelly mistreated children over the centuries have dearly needed:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

What Do You Do with a Phantom Sailor Suit? A New Note with Some "New" Old Evidence on Cornell Woolrich, the Blackton Sisters and the Infamous Story of the Sex Diary

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor

Early in the Morning

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor

Early in the Morning 

--"Drunken Sailor," Trad. Sea Shanty

Cornell on the left, Bill on the right

The linchpin of Francis Nevins' claim that Cornell Woolrich was a "self-loathing homosexual" is the infamous sailor suit story.  Woolrich had gone out from New York to Los Angeles, California, to write screenplays for Hollywood and there in 1930 at the age of 27 he met 20-year-old Violet Virginia Blackton, who preferred to go by the name Gloria and was nicknamed by her family "Bill."  She was one of two daughters of film director J. Stuart "Commodore" Blackton, her elder half-sister, by a full decade, being Marian Constance Blackton.  Blackton was nicknamed Commodore on account of having been Commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club when the family lived in Brooklyn, New York. In the Twenties they moved out to California with the movie industry.  By 1930, with the onset of the Depression, the Blacktons were a bit on their uppers.

Woolrich vs. Woolrich
on this side Gloria, aka Bill

Young Bill and Cornell eloped on Dec. 6, 1930 but the marriage, which was never consummated, merely lasted, it is variously stated, less than three weeks or perhaps three months, before Cornell flew the coop and moved back to New York, leaving Bill a continent behind him. 

Nearly a half-century later, in 1977, when she was 76-years old, Marian Blackton, now Marian Trimble, was interviewed by Francis Nevins about her sister's marriage; and she produced, according to Nevins, quite a tale to tell. 

According to Nevins in his 1988 biography of Woolrich, Marian told him that Bill had told her that Woolrich had left a diary behind by mistake, in which he detailed having had in California a great many sexual encounters with other men, "in sordid and dreadful detail" (Nevins' words).  

Marian claimed too, according to Nevins, that Woolrich had also kept a sinister locked suitcase under his bed, which curious Bill took a peek into one day when Woolrich left it unlocked--such a careless boy and a curious girl--and found a sailor suit in it.  Horrors! 

Supposedly, according to Bill, according to Marian, according to Nevins, the shy and timid Woolrich, all 122 pounds of him (this is what he weighed according to his 1942 draft registration card), had a habit at night of dressing up in this sailor suit and going cruising for gay sex at the LA docks.  

on this side Cornell

"Clearly," intones Nevins shudderingly, "[Woolrich's] homosexual life was of the most furtive and sordid variety, a side of himself that he despised and was ashamed of, that he could neither accept nor suppress, that he never acknowledged publicly and dropped down the memory hole...."

Wow! This puts a lot of weight on a sex diary and a sailor suit that no one had ever seen, allegedly, besides long-dead Bill and a supposed parade of anonymous gay men.  We have no actual evidence besides this story, ostensibly from Marian and before her Bill, that these things ever existed.  (According to Barry Malzberg, Nevins played only a barely-audible recording of the Marian Trimble interview back to him.)

And the fact that there is no other evidence, or any evidence really, becomes evidence that not only was Woolrich gay but that he was one of those furtive and sordid ones, closeted and self-loathing.  (Yet he kept a diary about it all too!)

Marian, according to Nevins, went on to tell how Bill was brokenhearted by all this but didn't hold any grudges against Woolrich and behaved magnanimously.  "She was still in love with him and she was heartbroken," Nevins quotes Marian as telling him of Bill.  

In 1933, Bill filed in New York to have the marriage annulled, on the grounds that it had never been consummated.   Nevins speculates that the imminent exposure of Woolrich's homosexuality--he just takes it for granted at this point--must have had the author "keyed up and quivering with terror;" but fortunately for him Bill, "a decent person," said nothing about the "true ground for the action."

Bill complained that Con gave
more attention to his typewriter
than he did to her.

I looked into this part of the story when I wrote my Woolrich article in 2022 and found that a lot of Nevins' telling of the affair was flat wrong. Bill actually went to New York in 1932 to launch a stage career and while there the next year brought her annulment suit against Woolrich to a fanfare of national newspaper publicity. 

Bill didn't say Cornell was gay, she said he was a pallid sexless aesthete who could not perform his husbandly duties.  Considering that Woolrich wrote racy Jazz Age novels and romance fiction at the time, this was very damaging to his reputation, besides being personally humiliating.  It became crystal clear that, when it came to the he-man stuff, Cornell was just a pretender.  Nevins in 2010 told radio interviewer Leonard Lopate that Bill never did anything to embarrass Woolrich during the annulment, a claim, as we have seen, which simply could not be more incorrect.  

Bill also blithely claimed to the newspapers that she was the one who walked out on him. In the papers she was fawningly portrayed all around as beautiful and physical and dynamic, everything Woolrich was not.  One might be forgiven for thinking that Bill had cynically exploited her marriage with Woolrich to publicize her own stage career (which never went anywhere anyway).  

Woolrich himself pathetically told the newspapers: "We had a terrific fuss and Gloria left me.  I guess she couldn't understand why I was so quiet.  When she left the world fell in upon me just as if there had been an earthquake."  

a pair of strapping happy American sailors
(neither of them Cornell)

This doesn't sound anything at all like Nevins' account, nor Marian's, nor Bill's, nor whoever it was that may originally narrated it.  It's amazing to me that for over four decades, until I published my article at Crimereads, no one had ever unearthed this material from public records.  Instead people just salaciously repeated the same flimsy tittle-tattle as hard fact.  

Here's Thomas C. Renzi, who died at age 71 in 2019, in his 2015 book Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir.  He writes that information about Woolrich's supposed homosexuality 

comes from an objective source, Nevins' biographical opus of the author....Woolrich turned out to be a backstreet homosexual....he would dress in a sailor suit and comb the derelict dives and dens of the seedy waterfront for the kind of entertainment he could never find at home.

Stuart Blackton with his son Stuart, Jr. and his big-bowed younger daughter Violet
soon to become Gloria, aka Bill.  Note the boy's sailor suit.

Woolrich pictured in a 1927 
newspaper article when
he went out to Hollywood.
Said the interviewer of him:
"He was so boyish we
thought he had sent down a
younger brother to say that
the real Cornell Woolrich 
would be down in a minute."

Then there's Eddie Muller, 67, in his introduction to Open Road's 2020 reprint of one of Woolrich's finest crime novels, The Bride Wore Black:

Woolrich was a compulsive liar, always rewriting facts to tell a better story.  We do know, thanks to Nevins' research, that Woolrich was a self-loathing gay man whose lifelong residency in a locked closet no doubt contributed to the secrecy and paranoia which drips from the stories.  

At least Muller varies the take slightly by calling Woolrich a "self-loathing gay man" rather than a "self-loathing homosexual" but Nevins, 83, and Renzi, who would be 78 were he alive today, evidently could never bring themselves to utter the word gay in their writing. 

Instead it's always the very clinical homosexual, punctuated with very disapproving phrases like "backstreet homosexual," which sound like they come out of one of those scarifying antigay Fifties high school "educational" films.  

The notion that Nevins is an objective source for all this is highly questionable, I would say.  As early as 1971, six years before he interviewed Marian Trimble and extracted the diary and suitcase stories, evidently, Nevins had already proclaimed that Woolrich was "obsessed with the fear that he was homosexual."  This seems to have been the genesis in print of the "Cornell was gay" thesis.  

Jeanne Moreau as the title character
in The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Where did Nevins get the "facts" for that claim in 1971, three years after Woolrich's death?  I have no idea, actually.  All I know is that Nevins has been hugely attached to this theory for at least 55 years, practically the whole of my own lifetime.  He also has applied it as the explanation for other gay crime writers' problems. Maybe this is as much or more about Nevins as it is Woolrich.  

In a contemporary review of Nevins' 1988 biography Charles Champlin of the LA Times writes, truthfully enough, that "the seven page introduction that Nevins wrote for the 1980s Ballantine editions [of Woolrich's novels] revealed almost as much about Woolrich as the 600-page long biography."  

I'd honestly be very much surprised if many people have "read" Nevins' biography.  (This is an even less likely feat today, in our postliterate era, when I've had some people complain my own forty-page Woolrich essay is too long.)  The Nevins bio is more a book you dip into briefly, like an encyclopedia, then come up for air.  

Where Champlin goes wrong is when he asserts that Nevins "gleaned [Woolrich's life] to the last crumpled scrap of copy paper."  Nevins, relying heavily on personal interviews. in fact did little work in the contemporary newspaper and census records, for example. And evidence that contradicted the self-hating homosexual thesis had a way of not making into into the book.  

Marian Blackton in 1922
at age 21

Whatever his motivations and his own obsessions, Nevins certainly has established none of these contentions about the sex diary and the sailor suit as "fact."  Contrary to what Muller wrote, we don't "know" that the author was a self-loathing gay man who lived his life in a locked closet.  We don't know what his sexuality was.  He could have been gay, straight, bisexual or asexual--pay your money and take your chance.  

We do know that Woolrich had a mother fixation and trouble relating with strangers.  And he does seem to have had considerable self-esteem issues and possibly a masochistic streak. But the homosexuality stuff has always been speculative, nailed down by absolute hearsay which never should have been trotted out as factual.  It's as substantial as the vaporous claim that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross dresser.  It would be quite plausible to me that Woolrich never had sex with anyone.  

But here's another interesting new "fact"--and it is a fact.  Eight years after her interview with Nevins, Marian Trimble published a biography of her father in 1985, when she was 84 years old.  And in it there's a page about her sister Bill and Cornell's marriage!  I have known about the existence of this book for four years but only recently was able to get my hands on a copy of it.  I'm going to quote the entirely of the Bill-Cornell passage:

speaking of "sailors"
Commodore Blackton
a pioneering filmmaker and
the father of Marian and Violet, 
aka Gloria, aka Bill

Bill (Gloria) was the first to break away from our gay [family] quintette.  To our utter astonishment, and quite without need to do so, she eloped with Cornell Woolrich, a sandy-haired, impecunious young writer from New York.  Some bright agent had sold him across the Continent as New York's brightest gift to Hollywood. Cornell didn't think this was so, and presently demonstrated his conviction.  He flopped quietly and completely.  

Lean, hungrier looking than Cassius, Mr. Woolrich enslaved Bill's mother-complexed emotions within the first hour of their meeting.  And one day came the wire, "Bill and I have taken the plunge hand in hand," signed Cornell.  

When the apprehensive couple returned from the honeymoon trip, to stand, hand in hand, awaiting the family reproof, they were greeted with a few, quiet, amiable words from my father and an absent-minded "Oh hello" from T. [her brother] and me.  Then everybody went on as if nothing had happened.  

This was in September.  Just before Christmas Cornell eloped again, this time all by himself, leaving Bill to clutch at the furniture and make hideous sobbing sounds whenever the radio played "Body and Soul" or "I Surrender, Dear," which, in 1931, was practically all the time.

the Commodore and daughter Marian

My father and I made inept, inarticulate attempts to ease Bill's agony.  She was not to be consoled.  For fully six weeks Bill never got over it.  When, at last, Mr. Woolrich explained to her by phone that it had all been a terrible mistake, Bill made him a dignified farewell.  She then went out and bought a new shade of eyeshadow, a gesture we all applauded as a sign that the the worst had passed and we could now safely hear the two current hit songs through to the end.

That's it, just under 300 words devoted to the matter which so preoccupied Nevins and his followers.  Some of the facts are discernably wrong, like Marian's statement that Bill and Cornell eloped in September.  The documentary record clearly states it was December 6, 1930.  If the couple really parted before Christmas, the two lived together for less than three weeks.  This would seem to comport with the idea that Cornell realized he would not be able actually to have sex with Bill.  (Three months, conversely, seems a long time for that realization to dawn.)  

"I Surrender, Dear," a big Bing Crosby hit, was not released until February 5, 1931, so it doesn't seem like Bill would have been sobbing wildly to that tune in the weeks following their breakup.  

By the way, the lyrics to this song run 

"I may seem proud/And I may act gay/That's just a pose/I'm not that way."  Words for the wise.  

Woolrich came out to Hollywood in 1927 because his second youthful novel, Children of the Ritz, published when he was just 24 years old, won a $10,000 prize and was optioned by a film studio, but Marian does not credit him with that.  The tone she adopts toward him is sardonic and more than a bit contemptuous. What she does NOT talk about is Cornell Woolrich being gay, the sailor suit or the sex diary.  So what we are left with is what Nevins stated she said to him back in 1977.  

the first film adapted from a Woolrich novel

The truth is we don't know that this phantom diary and cruising sailor suit ever existed, even though when Nevins spoke with Leonard Lopate, he stated that Bill returned the diary to Woolrich and declared that he destroyed it.  This is actually what we call assumptions.  And we all know that when you assume, you make an ass u me.  

By phone I talked to writer Anthony Slide, who prepared Marian's manuscript for book publication 41 years ago, and he told me that he didn't cut anything from her Woolrich account, certainly not anything about sex diaries and sailor suits.  Much to the contrary, he says he would certainly have left such material in.  

So why didn't Marian talk about any of this in her book like she apparently did with Nevins?  Is it possible she was simply fancifying to Nevins?  Or that Bill was fancifying to her?  We just can't know at this point.  But Bill, even according to her own half-sister, was not the most stable and reliable of persons herself.  

Certainly Bill Blackton had a flair for the dramatic. After breaking up with Cornell, she took up enthusiastically with a rail-thin carnival "premature burial hypnotist" named Rudy--evidently big-boned Bill had a pash for scrawny men--who wanted to put her under a trance and bury her in a coffin six feet underground. Happily for Bill's future existence in the material world, the city police stepped in at that point.  (Interestingly, one of Cornell Woolrich's suspense tales drew upon this general subject.)

On the phone with me tonight Anthony Slide described the Blackton family as "pretty weird."  Only the brother was a "solid citizen," according to Marian, who herself was bisexual and had a later-in-life intimate relationship with Margerie Bonner, widow of novelist Malcolm Lowry.  

now here are some gay sailors

Cornell was pretty weird too, to be sure.  But was he a "self-loathing homosexual"?  There is no way anyone can responsibly state this as a fact, or even a likelihood, though people have been insisting on it for forty years.  

Cornell was frequently self-loathing and a sad mess in many ways, yes. In my opinion his problems, going all the way back to his neglected childhood, went far beyond any sexuality he may have had.  As an adult his encounter with the flaky Bill was, for him, epochal, because it exposed him, an exceedingly emotionally fragile person, to national humiliation as a pathetic sexless eunuch; and he never recovered from this degradation. It unalterably changed, and, on a personal level, largely destroyed, Woolrich's life, though it gave us the priceless black legacy of Cornell's crime fiction.  

Was this callous destruction worth the personal emotional cost to the author? That Nevins, getting it precisely ass-backwards, portrays young Bill Blackton, rather than Woolrich, as the victim in all of this, is the sort of sad irony that the author himself endlessly depicted in his crime writing.  Rather than a forgiving angel of mercy, Bill in the end behaved like the vengeful title character in Woolrich's The Bride wore Black--though her motivation was for more ignoble than the Bride's, perverse as that may have been.  

After the advent of Hurricane Gloria, Cornell Woolrich took what shelter he could, living n apartment-bound, isolated existence, for nearly three decades with his doting mother, then, after her death, for another decade alone in ever-increasing squalor. He was agoraphobic and anemic and paranoid and mother fixated, for sure, probably masochistic too.  (That certainly shows up in his writing.) Whether he was actually gay is a mystery, and largely an ancillary matter to the story of the author's life.  Don't let that phantom sailor suit of the last four decades bemuse you.  

the briefly happy couple