Not to be outdone by his archrival Hearst—who continued to run periodic pieces on the trial by Clement Scott—Joseph Pulitzer brought in his own celebrity commentator from the theatrical world: famed American playwright Bronson Howard, author, among other hits, of the enormously successful Civil War drama Shenandoah. In his first article for the World—headlined BRONSON HOWARD ON THE DRAMATIC SIDE OF THE MOLINEUX TRIAL—the writer focused on the performances of the principal figures in the case, with particular attention to James Osborne.
Like Scott, Howard was deeply impressed by Osborne’s forensic skills, praising him as “a naturally great criminal lawyer.” Still, the playwright made it clear that if he were directing the show, he would have Osborne tone down his act. The assistant DA had the “wrong conception” of his part. In Howard’s view, a prosecuting attorney should feel—or at least convincingly project—a perfect impartiality. As “an officer representing the state,” he “should appear deeply anxious that the accused man be proven innocent if the facts in the case warrant it…for the state wants no man found guilty. It wants only justice.” Osborne, on the other hand, left no doubt of his desire “to prove the guilt of the prisoner.”1
Howard’s criticism—that the prosecutor seemed overly eager to win a conviction—would have been odd in any circumstance. But it seemed especially paradoxical in the case of Osborne, who during the inquest had been attacked on the opposite grounds—for being too soft on Roland. Certainly, few people in the courtroom would have agreed with the playwright. For all of Osborne’s “scorn for courtroom conventionalities”—his refusal “to present the evidence in the acceptably logical order”—the intensity, even ferocity, he brought to his task added a welcome jolt of energy to the proceedings.2
In his eagerness to put Mamie Melando on the stand, Osborne had broken off his questioning of the state’s chief handwriting witness, William Kinsley. Now the assistant DA resumed his examination of the expert chirographer, whose testimony would drag on for another full week.
Day after day, spending much of his time illustrating his points at a blackboard, Kinsley would drone on about the minutiae of lowercase letters, punctuation marks, and word spacing. As he lectured, the fifty-odd reporters covering the trial would scribble away in their notebooks like obedient pupils. To more than one observer, the highly touted Great Poison Trial had rapidly degenerated into pure tedium, with all the drama and excitement of a high school penmanship class.
So soporific was the atmosphere that spectators and court officials alike could be seen snoozing in their seats, while the yellow papers began running satirical pieces recommending a visit to the courtroom as a surefire cure for insomnia.3
The most wakeful people in the courtroom were a contingent of Roland’s female admirers, who had managed to wangle their way inside. Fifteen or twenty of them occupied the first two rows of the spectator benches, those in front—like considerate theatergoers—removing their bonnets so as not to obstruct the view of the women behind them. Ignoring the witness, they kept their eyes fixed on Roland, who as usual seemed to regard the proceedings as the height of hilarity, “laughing loud and long and very contemptuously” throughout Kinsley’s testimony.4
His demeanor turned noticeably grimmer when Osborne—interrupting his examination of Kinsley yet again—called Robert S. Holt, Jr., to the stand. The son of Henry Barnet’s employer, Holt was asked to authenticate a letter written by Barnet, which Kinsley intended to compare with one of the forgeries. It was a purely perfunctory matter. In the course of the questioning, however, Holt made an unexpected admission.
He revealed that he had once seen Blanche alone with Barnet in the latter’s room at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, a half-empty bottle of champagne on the table between them. It was the first time during the trial that Blanche’s name had been invoked, and it offered, as the Journal put it, a “startling glimpse of that life of gayety, revelry, wine, love and jealousy in which the prosecutor believes the poison plot had its birth.”5
Roland’s defense team responded with the same tactic they had employed earlier. To demonstrate that Roland had not the slightest cause for jealousy, they immediately trotted out Blanche for another public display of wifely devotion.
She arrived on the morning of December 18 in the company of her mother-in-law. As the audience buzzed with excitement, the two women strolled to the front of the courtroom and took seats at the defense table. When, a few minutes later, Roland crossed over the Bridge of Sighs and entered the chamber, he put on a convincing show of surprise, widening his eyes and smiling brightly. Bounding down the central aisle, he bent low, put one hand behind Blanche’s head, and “kissed her fair and square on the lips.” Then, after embracing his mother, he seated himself beside his wife.
As always, Blanche was fashionably attired. She wore a black velvet toque trimmed with black tulle that sat far down on her forehead, a tippet and muff of sable, an elaborately embroidered black cloth coat, and white kid gloves. Though most observers conceded that her looks were far from perfect (“Probably Roland Molineux is the only man in the world who could call his wife beautiful,” sniffed one reporter), all agreed that she possessed a striking charm. “Altogether,” opined one newsman, who might have been describing Henry James’s Daisy Miller, “Mrs. Molineux seems to me to be a good, strong, healthy type of American girl: not too intellectual.”6
Before the trial resumed, Goff had another piece of business to attend to: the case of a teenager named Jacob Berisham who had spent the past four years in the House of Refuge, having murdered a playmate at the age of twelve by bashing in his head with a shovel blade. Blanche appeared keenly interested in the matter, shuddering visibly as the “uncouth youth” was brought before Goff for sentencing.7
Her interest—like that of most people in the courtroom—waned considerably when Kinsley returned to the stand for his tenth and final day of testimony. Throughout much of the morning session, she listened to his lecture on slants and curves and curlicues with a look of barely disguised boredom, occasionally holding a whispered exchange with Roland or placing a small cut-glass phial of perfume to her nostrils to offset the air of the packed and stuffy chamber, many of whose male occupants did not, evidently, observe the highest standards of personal hygiene (“the atmosphere,” one newsman dryly observed, “is not that of Araby the Blest”).8
To most of the reporters who studied them, Roland and Blanche seemed the very picture of conjugal happiness. At one point, she placed an arm around her husband, who rested his head on her shoulder—a tender moment captured in a front-page illustration in the following day’s edition of Pulitzer’s World. At other times, Roland slipped his hand beneath the table and gave her knee an affectionate pat. When recess was called and it was time for her to leave, Blanche, in full view of the court, pulled Roland close and kissed him on the mouth.
It was clear, wrote Hearst’s reporter, that the couple were “very much in love.” Neither he nor anyone else, of course, guessed the truth. As Blanche makes clear in her memoirs, every moment she spent in the courtroom was an agonizing ordeal. By that point, her resentment of Roland had reached such a pitch that she could barely bring herself to utter his name, coldly referring to him as “General Molineux’s son.” Only her sympathy for her in-laws—along with other pressures brought to bear on her by Roland’s family and legal defenders—compelled her to go through with the charade. Once again, as she had done several weeks earlier, Blanche managed to turn in a first-rate performance—one so persuasive that even the famous playwright Bronson Howard failed to realize he was watching an act.