During the past few weeks, my series on Greta Garbo films has been pause because Various Things Happened. Now the series is starting up again, and I do realize that I stopped rather awkwardly between Part 2 and Part 3 of the extravaganza celebrating "Queen Christina." I wish I had Part 3 ready for you. But over these past weeks I've done so much research and there is so very much to say about "Queen Christina," that 1933 treasure of a film, that the final essay on the subject has become less of a blog post and more a Master's thesis for submission to no university anywhere. So while I'm busy getting my notes and links and graphics all sorted for Part 3, I'll pop in this week with a Garbo film cultural side note. This is the improbable story of a real-life tragedy: the 1911 fatal shooting of author David Graham Phillips.
On January 26, 1911, a weekly newspaper in Santa Barbara, California published the Associated Press account of the shooting, which had happened in New York. After the image, I've included the text of the article, as I know the clipping is hard to read.
PUBLIC FUNERAL FOR LAMENTED AUTHOR Friends of David Graham Phillips May Attend Last Sad Rites. LITERARY GENIUSES WILL BE PALL BEARERS Relatives of Slayer Have No Idea As to Wliat Prompted Terrible Deed—Murderer To lie Buried in Washington—Could Fight Two Bullets But Not Six.
By the Associated Press.
NEW YORK, Jan. 25. —The funeral of David Graham Phillips will be public. There are so many friends and admirers stirred by the assassination that plans for a private funeral were abandoned. Services will be held Friday at 2 o’clock at St. George’s Episcopal church, near the scene of the attack. The pall bearers will be Senator Beveridge, Robert W. Chambers, author: Joseph H. Sears, head of the Appleton Publishing house; George Horace Lorimer, of the Saturday Evening Post; Arthur W. Little, editor Pearson’s; Samuel G. Blythe, John O’Hara Cosgrove, former editor of Everybody's, and Otto Carmichel. Tonight the body was taken to the rooms of the National Arts club and after the funeral it will be taken to the receiving vault in Marble cemetery, where it will remain until it is taken to his former home in Indiana. The body of David Graham Phillips, the slain novelist, will be laid to rest in Greenwood cemetery, Brooklyn, Mrs. Caroline Frevert, who stood at her brother’s bedside as he breathed his last shortly before midnight, and Senator Albert .1. Beveridge of Indiana, Phillip's close friend, visited the cemetery this morning with the intention of selecting the spot for the grave. The body was taken from Bellevue hospital to an undertaking establishment on Fourth avenue, and will be transferred later to the National Arts club, the writer’s former home, George Horace Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and Samuel G. Blythe, associates of Phillips’ are assisting Senator Beveridge in arranging the funeral. The time and place of holding the services were expected to be announced this afternoon. The body of Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, who slew Phillips, which was borne to the railway station in Jersey City as the novelist was breathing his- last, will be buried in Washington today. What is regarded as an explanation of his crime—or the explanation that might be given by a man obsessed—is found in extracts from his diary made public by the district attorney and a statement made today by Goldsborough's uncle, T. H. Powers Farr, of this city. “Fitzhugh had ail the eccentricities of genius,” said Mr. Farr. “The entire family is musical and the developments of music seemed to have been strongest in the boy. He was far from being practical. “He was most courtly in his ideas about women, and we are of the opinion he became incensed at Mr. Phillips because of his interpretation of some of the characters in Phillips’ books. We think he brooded over this until he began to look upon Phillips as an enemy and decided to kill him. We can explain his mad action in no other way.” Phillips buoyed his courage with the oft-repeated declaration that he realized that death was with him. “I could fight two wounds but not six. I fear the odds are too great against me,” were his last words whispered to Dr. Eugene Fuller. Robert W. Chambers, the novelist, who has been, perhaps, Phillips’ closest associate in New York said: “He was one of the best of men. He was high minded and true and one of the finest of American writers. His best work seemed yet to come—he was just finding himself and had struck a vein that promised richly for the future.” Miss Hildegard Hawthorne, speaking of her personal acquaintance with Mr. Phillips, said: “The desire to work the ideas of his country and his age was always uppermost in his ambition and he was growing so rapidly toward his idea in this direction that his friends had already alloted him a lofty place in letters. We believed him destined to lasting fame as the exponent of American life and the problems that beset it.” It was a curious coincidence that while Mr. Phillips was breathing his last in his hospital room a silent procession from a nearby undertaker's was carrying the body of his assailant to the railway station in Jersey City. The casket with Us strange load of tragedy was put aboard a train at midnight and was shipped to Washington, where the young fanatic will be burled tomorrow. That Mr. Phillips’ assailant was demented appears to have been demonstrated conclusively, not, only by the curious testimony of his diary and notebooks, but also by his appeals to Mayor Gaynor's secretary and other officials for protection from persons who he believed were hounding him. The entries in the diary showed that he had translated to personal abuse the author’s picturesque characterization of a class in his novel on Washington life, “The fashionable adventures of Joshua Craig,” and under this misconstruction had conceived a homicidal hatred of which the victim was unaware. Mr. Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana, in 1567, was a Princeton graduate and unmarried. He was one of the Indiana group of story tellers which includes Booth Tarkington, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Charles Major and others. He had written twenty novels, many “best sellers” among them—and numerous magazine articles...
The subheading of the A.P. news item quotes the victim as saying that he could withstand two bullets and not six. The number of bullets is a matter of dispute; a number of online sources give the number of shots fired at the victim as five, while others say it was one more. All the accounts do agree that the assailant then shot himself.
I was puzzled for a bit that there could have been six shots and then one more. Most of my technical knowledge (if you can call it that) about pistols and ammo involves movie Western six-shooters, or film noir detectives with their backs to the wall calling into the darkness around the corner "Give it up, Simpson, I counted six shots and you're out of bullets!" And the crook yells "Five! You can't count, detective! It was five! I saved the last one for you!" But a couple minutes' internet searching showed me a Browning pistol manufactured in 1910 which came in two model; one held seven bullets. So, once again I have been fooled by "facts" I learned in the movies.
By the way, one of the subscriber to the idea that the victim was shot six times is the author of this 1992 Sherlock Holmes pastiche centered on the 1911 historical event:
It always helps me, when looking at history, to see the places where events happened. The shooting of David Graham Phillips took place in front of The Princeton Club, in New York's Gramercy Park neighborhood.
When he was killed, David Graham Phillips had been walking to The Princeton Club from another grand old building in Gramercy Park, The National Arts Club, where he had an apartment. Phillips received his mail at The Princton Club, which incidentally was the former home of slain architect Stamford White, who'd been murdered by millionaire Harry Thaw over White's pursuit of Thaw's wife, former actress Evelyn Nesbit. These stately New York buildings have houses some of the biggest scandals ever. (If it's rich people, that's a scandal. If it's poor people, it's common crime.)
The writer had no idea that Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough had taken an apartment a block away because he was a deranged stalker who wanted to keep an eye on Phillips. Earlier in his life, David Phillips might have been more concerned for his personal safety as his work as a newspaperman and a freelance journalist made enemies of powerful people and caused governmental reforms which cost rich people a lot of money. It was Phillips who exposed the fact that United States Senators, who were nominated from inside the system and not by the public, were owned by powerful companies like Standard Oil. Phillips was labeled "The Man With the Muck Rake" by President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, a famous rider of horses, "muck" was not mud but horse poop. Mucking out a stall means cleaning poop and dirty straw from a horse's stall, right? Despite the name-calling, investigative journalism aka muckraking had begun because of Phillips' exposé.
Clearly Theodore Roosevelt held David Graham Phillips in contempt, but want to know who in this grim story the President rubbed shoulders with? Check out this program from the 1907 graduation ceremony at a private school in Washington D.C., at which Roosevelt was the commencement speaker:
Yes, Teddy Roosevelt might have almost literally been rubbing elbows with Phillips' killer. Fitzhugh Goldsborough was the guest violinist who played three selections before the President's address. Everyone was pretty packed in tight together, as we can see from this photo of the commencement ceremony. The captions are blurry, but I think the second name on the list is Fitzhugh Goldsborough's, which would make him the second person from the left of the people facing the viewer. This photo was taken four years before Goldsborough committed murder on a New York street, at a time when he was twenty-eight years old, and presumably a celebrity alumnus of Sidwell Friends School.
Now, permit me a bit of dark humor expressed in Scottish folk song.
This photo of the Philadelphia Sumphony Orchestra was taken in the 1920s, well after violinist Goldsborough's departure:
And here is a portrait of Fitzhugh Goldsborough with his instrument:
Why did Goldsborough shoot a novelist he didn't know? He said it was because of this novel.
The cover illustration makes the book look like one of those creepy Edward Gorey send-ups but the Phillips novel is just a satire mocking the ways of rich lazy people born into their money. The kind of person Fitzhugh Goldsborough was, actually. The murderous violinist was the son of a prosperous doctor who'd moved the family from their hometown of Baltimore to swankier digs in the nation's capital. Goldsborough was given a private education, then sent to Harvard, then indulged by his wealthy relatives. But in his view, he had an enemy who was trying to turn the entire world against him and his family.
We know what was going on in Goldsborough's mind because he'd been writing to Phillips for weeks, and as Phillips was in the hospital dying of his wounds, he told his sister Caroline that he'd been getting insane hate mail from someone convinced that the female lead character in The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig, Margaret Severance, was modeled on his (the madman's) youngest sister, Ann. Phillips had called the invented character Margaret Severance "a fashionable noodle-head," and the enraged brother wasn't going to tolerate this unchivalrous behavior.
Yes, the former violinist of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra had quit his job, come back to his family's new home city of Washington, and moved into a Gramercy Park apartment near Phillips because Phillips had called an imaginary rich girl in a novel a fashionable noodle-head. He also had the idea that a young woman in Phillips' building had given him (Goldsborough) the eye from an upper window, and then he'd seen a man in the room with the young woman, and assumed it was Phillips, though Phillips actually lived on another floor. Goldsborough had gone to the police complaining that two private detectives were following him, and that these detectives were connected with Phillps' novelistic attacks on him and his family. Oh, and also the madman thought that Phillips had magic mental powers which allowed him to read Goldsborough's mind and also to transmit his own thoughts into Goldsborough's brain-pan. To top it all off, Goldsborough signed his last letter to David Graham Phillips with the signature "David Graham Phillips." It's unclear as to whether the stalker wanted the world to know after his death that the murder had been planned, or if the mad violinist had come to believe that the imagined mental telepathy to and from Phillips made the two men the same person. Hoo boy.
Since Phillips and Goldsborough didn't know each other, there was some confusion for the authorities at the time of the shooting about the killer's motive. Goldsborough had moved near Gramercy Park, and the building he chose happened to be a socialist collective, so the press speculated that it was a political killing. Understandable because of the 1901 assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgolz, at a time when the average citizen could easily have confused anarchism with socialism, but the victim in this case was actually someone who advocated for the little guy over big business interests.
After the murder, as noted in the A. P. report, the killer's uncle blamed the incident on the musician's artistic temperament. Other members of Goldsborough's family said that Fitzhugh's wild imaginings were the result of a severe bout of influenza which had sort of cooked his brain with fever. The family tried to keep secret the fact that, at the time of the shooting, Goldsborough's younger brother was a patient in a sanatorium, being treated for his own mental illness.
Some people outside the family thought that Goldsborough envied Phillips' fame and success based on hard work and talent. It probably hurt to know that Phillips' prose was so well-regarded, because Goldsborough was not satisfied with being a European-trained violinist good enough to play in a major orchestra. He also wanted to be recognized as a poet and a wit, and he foisted his terrible verse and mediocre epigrams on acquaintances, who either pretended to like them because Goldsborough was wealthy and from a prominent family, or told him the truth. Fewer people did the latter when it became known that Goldsborough had broken an expensive violin over the head of one of the orchestra's trumpet players when he dared to say that his colleague's poems were awful.
After the murder, the killer's body was quietly stowed in a railroad car in Jersey City, and sent to the family. But Phillips had such a large turnout for the funeral that his relatives felt obliged to open it to the public. A couple of months later, a publication called The Bookman contained this image of the late novelist at his writing table:
Remember back to when David Phillips, as he lay wounded, told his sister Caroline about the crazy hate mail he'd been getting? After Phillips' death, Caroline went to her late brother's apartment at the National Arts Club building, and she discovered a completed manuscript of an unpublished novel. She got the pages in order and all that, and took it to a publisher. In 1917, six years after his death, David Graham Phillips' novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, was posthumously published.
A film version of the novel, starring Greta Garbo and Clark Gable, was released in 1931.
Here are a xouple of stills from the movie:
Writing a novel which would become the basis of a Greta Garbo film was actually the third most influential effect on the world David Graham Phillips had. His magazine article about corruption in the U.S. Senate changed the system and was instrumental in having us vote for our Senators instead of having them chosen for us. And Phillips' shocking death by a madman with a .32 handgun was one of a cluster of violent crimes which led to New York's toughening up gun control laws, far ahead of other places in our nation.
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Notes: The image of The Princton Club came from this cool graphic arts site, where there are other artistic depictions of the building from over the years.
David Graham Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana, where my middle sister was also born, as my family lived in Madison around 1958-1959. This postcard is from that time.
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