"Ay, ay, ay, ay
Canto y no llores"
--"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.
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 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 a decade earlier. 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.
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| Brighton Beach Hotel, where Cornwell Woolrich's mother once tinkled the ivories |
It may have been the case that Claire, like some people have found 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. As she aged 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.
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| son and mother, together again at last |
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 him:
"He won't let me take you with me....I would take you to the Hippodrome and to vaudevilles. I would by 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."
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| a 1930s photo pf Genaro Woolrich unfortunately in execrable condition |
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 and possibly celiac disease. 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 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 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 visits to New York at least twice, in 1908 and 1913, when he was four and nine respectively. On the 1908 trip, Claire's 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 for only 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 that decade made Cornell the desperately unhappy adult that he became, though his miserable 1930 marriage to Gloria "Bill" Blackton did it's 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. 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.
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| 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 port on Lake Michigan 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.
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| 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 resident of southern Mexico." He had long known Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, who in 1911 was on the verge of being overthrown. Diaz had been jefe politico (political chief) of Tehauntepec back in the 1850s and a longtime "intimate friend" of Hopley's, who insisted that Diaz was a "just and honest man."
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| 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 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 Frederic (Federico) back with him to Mexico, where he, Francis, died. Supposedly none of Thomas Hopley's children could for long abide life outside of Mexico.
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| 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. 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 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."
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| 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 Diaz into exile in France. Cornell's less fortunate Uncle Carlos that year was actually 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 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 in 1917, leaving a large estate, including substantial legacies to some of his Canadian relatives. One got the equivalent in modern dollars of $150,000, 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 with a his half-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 Cornell's father was "somewhat schizoid, extremely withdrawn, extremely silent," a late riser and an all-day drinker of rum.
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| 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 with (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, 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 perhaps 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 them someday.
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| political broadside 1911 |
Possibly around two million died in Mexico during the Revolution , which, after General/President Diaz was overthrown in 1911, devolved, really, into more of a Civil War, a confusing mess of evolving faction and Machiavellian plots and counterplots. Woolrich himself wrote of towns he lived in constantly changing hands and of walking over piles of spent gun cartridges. In his short fiction set in Mexico he invariably portrays revolutionaries negatively, in this reflecting the privileged Porfirista background of his father's family.
Woolrich viewed Mexico on the whole sardonically and negatively, never having really fit in there. Pale, auburn-haired and frail, 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 rebel leader Pancho Villa. For a time full-scale war between the two countries seemed not unlikely.
Cornell said the vengeful boys, denouncing him as a gringo, actually hit him with their little missiles, drawing 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 from Genaro, who saw two of his brother assassinated in 1911, to his 12-year-old son was, "Well, and what do you want from me? Stand up for yourself!" Supposedly Cornell resorted to financial chicanery, 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. It seems that Cornell had no real friends in Mexico. "I lived in hotels a lot and went years before meeting others boys," he 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, 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 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.
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| Cornell hated the idea of his father running round with Mexican women and being unfaithful to his mother. |
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.
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