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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| signed Hopley Woolrich |
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