The working life of Museum of London

We are finally getting to the end of this story and as per usual I want to begin with some more objects from the Countess’s collection. The dress below, like the tomato-red number from the last entry, is also from the late 1920s and probably the most spectacular item from the Countess’s wardrobe.

The top part is very Paco Rabanne and made of some chainmail-like mesh of blue thread and folded strips of metal.

It must have looked spectacular and I like to think the Countess wore it with her very beautiful F Pinet shoes, possibly bought in the shop in New Bond Street (sadly the shoe nails have become rusty and caused marks on the insoles).

But let’s get back to the story. After their wedding in Jersey in April 1920, Cheiro and his wife seemed to have lived in Ireland for a while. In 1924 and 1925 they were listed at 21 Park Square East, a fine address near London’s Regent’s Park, moving to 13 Nottingham Terrace nearby some time before 1928. Two years later, aged around 64 and 48 respectively, the Count and Countess moved to Hollywood, where they apparently lived in an ‘old-world-looking house surrounded by over two acres of gardens and half concealed by palms and beautiful trees in one of the principal avenues’ (introduction by Major W.H. Cross to Confessions: memoirs of a modern seer, 1932).

We get an insight into Cheiro’s life in California from a letter to the magazine Liberty published in autumn 1971. It was written by Olga Rosmanith who published some mildly sensational novels in the 1950s (‘woman uncertain whether she will find peace or madness in orgiastic rites finds herself the intended sacrifice to a nameless god of evil – Unholy Flame, 1952) and was working as a journalist in the 1930s. When she met Cheiro

he was ill and had a deadline of two books of memoirs and palmistry. I offered to write them for him if he would teach me his science. So I was living in his house (to work at nights) in 1930 and met the people who came there. I met Paul Bern and Jean Harlow together, for they came to him for counsel. I loved her at once, a darling girl and nothing like her screen image of hard-boiled brassiness. Pure acting and very good.

Rosmanith also remarks upon a somewhat unexpected character trait of the palmist, discretion:  ‘Cheiro was a repository of star secrets which would make a very startling book since he knew things the gossip mongers never found out and was ethical and kept them secret.’

Cheiro continued to publish books, not entirely without gossip, and apparently also tried his hand at ‘movie scenarios’ before dying, aged 69, on 8 October 1936. The Countess returned to England, apparently taking her husband’s ashes with her, but we know that in 1941 she returned to the US, where this story takes another unexpected turn. On 16 January 1943 The New York Times reported the verdict in a recent court case:

Ex-Wife fails to Annul Second Marriage Of the Husband She Deserted 40 Years Ago
A wife’s suit to annul the second marriage of the husband she left forty years ago and her demand that, at least formally, he must once again take her to his ‘bed and board’ was dismissed yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court, the principal piece of evidence against her being the faded photograph of her baby boy on which she scrawled a farewell note in June 1902.

The principals were Henry A. Hartland, 65-year-old purchasing agent, of 18 Lawrence Place, Bay Shore, L.I., and his first wife, Mrs. Katie Hartland, 60-year-old English woman, living at 236 East Fourth Street, Brooklyn, who said that for sixteen years prior to 1936 she was the wife of “Cheiro” [...].

Seeking to have the marriage of her husband to his present wife, Harriet Hartland, in 1919, annulled on the ground that his marriage to his first wife is still valid, Mrs. Hartland charged that the defendant had left her in 1902 while she and her son Jack, were living in Boston. Mrs. Hartland said that several years later she was told her husband had died at sea [...].

Mr. Hartland testified that in 1902 he was working in Manhattan for $11 a week and sending $7 a week to his wife and child in Boston. He said that on June 23, 1902, his wife visited him in New York and that they attended a show and spent the night at a hotel. He said she returned to Boston and three days later sent him a letter containing a photograph of their son and on the back was written “Baby Jack at age of 2 years and 7 months. I send this in fond remembrance of our last night spent together in New York. Good-bye. Sincerely, your wife.” Mr. Hartland said he never saw her again until she called him on the telephone in April 1941, thirty-nine years later.

Justice Isaac R. Swezey ruled that Mr. Hartland’s second marriage was valid because prior to 1922 it was not necessary to obtain a dissolution decree. He also held that the first Mrs. Hartland had willfully abandoned her husband and declared that the note on the back of the photograph was a “directional beacon” and “a damaging shred of evidence.”

A previous article about the case in the same publication furnishes some further information. Jack Hartland first went to New York on his own to work as a shipping clerk. (This must have been after March 1901 when the couple is still listed as living in London in the census records.) He then brought over his wife and son Jack Albert to live in Boston ‘making occasional visits to them on week-ends’. As Katie upped an ran in June 1902, this arrangement could not have lasted much more than a year.

Following his wife’s disappearance, Jack apparently wrote to her relatives in England but never heard anything until the phone call mentioned above. Katie claimed that she had been ‘blitzed’ out of her home ‘on the south coast of England’ (quite likely to be true) and had come to the US to visit her brother, where she ‘accidentally’ (my inverted commas) found the name ‘Hartland’ in a phone book, leading to a relative of her former husband. Jack, who must have been dumbfounded, agreed to meet in a hotel in Manhattan where Katie asked for financial support, mainly to cover the medical costs of their now 42-year-old son in England. I presume the request was not granted as Katie then filed for divorce and temporarily alimony, which was denied. Probably desperate at that point, Katie resorted to the court action described above.

I wonder whether we will ever know what made Katie leave her first husband. I have mentioned in a previous entry that the couple’s son was born less than nine months after their wedding. Maybe they would never have married, had she not been pregnant. I also wonder why she did not live in New York with her husband, but there might have been a whole host of sensible reasons for that decision.

What about the son? I don’t know much and most of it comes from Judy, whose father corresponded with the Countess in her later years. She wrote that Jack Albert had ’sustained a severe head injury when a gigantic hoarding fell on him’ and later voluntarily, and only temporarily, entered a ‘mental home’. According to his mother, Jack Albert was a very good musician, but ‘erratic’. He died during the war and is probably the same ‘Jack A Hartland’ whose death is listed in Upper Agbrigg (Huddersfield area) in Yorkshire in 1942.

The Countess returned to England and according to an entry in the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress she lived in East Street, Chichester, West Sussex in January 1944. There are quite a few entries for ‘Mena Hamon’ in the Copyright Office, I presume the Countess hoped to obtain royalties from her husband’s work. Probably in another effort to make some money, the Countess sold her ‘antiques’ at an auction house near Chichester in April 1947. According to Judy, further auctions of jewellery and furniture followed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so more of her former possessions must be around somewhere. It seems that Countess Hamon finally moved to a Nursing Home in Emsworth, not far from Chichester, and died in September 1969 at the age of 87.

There a few more things I want to say about this riveting (at least for me) story, so there will be a short postscript. For now I leave you with another detail of the beautiful Pinet shoes.