We
Were Dancing
on a Volcano
Bloodlines
and Fault Lines of a
Star-Crossed Atlanta Family
1849-1989
Joseph Gatins
We Were Dancing on a Volcano.
Copyright © 2009 Joseph F.M. Gatins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact: www.thegladepress.blogspot.com or www.josephgatins.blogspot.com.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Permissions.
Joseph F. Gatins Jr.’s 1901 college-era photo, courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries. Rawa-Ruska prisoner of war punishment camp line drawings and photo, courtesy of Ceux de Rawa-Ruska
Interior design by J.L. Saloff, Saloff Enterprises, www.Saloff.com
Photo layout and cover design by Honor Woodard, http://silvermoonfrog.blogspot.com
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2009908870
Cataloging-in-Publication
Gatins, Joseph.
We were dancing on a volcano : bloodlines and fault lines of a starcrossed Atlanta family : 1849-1989 /
Joseph Gatins. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-578-02779-1
ISBN-10: 0-578-02779-8
“Paris was very festive. Everyone was dancing on a volcano, but we were all dancing a lot. I had an extraordinary feeling that something was coming to an end—that our world, as we knew it, was fleeing and that we’d never see it again.”
– Eglé de Villelume-Sombreuil Gatins, 1939
For Fran
Table of Contents
Preface: One-armed Grandfather
14. “These Were Terrible Times”
15. Prisoner of War No. 50-894
17. Deaf-Mute Escape to Hamburg
27. Intercontinental Interlude
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Preface
One-armed Grandfather
I initially decided to write this book to find out more about my one-armed, Irish-American grandfather from Atlanta, whom no one in the family ever spoke of. In the end, more than a dozen years later, it had turned into a historical biography of family. I found out more about the French grandmother who married the one-armed man. I found their son, my father, and documented his adventures, which were an exercise in World War II survival and dealing with its post-traumatic aftermath. I found my mother, Colombian in temperament, but very French when it came to manners. And just maybe I unearthed a bit about myself, an all-American mélange, product of many cultures and languages. My forebears said good day (in English), bonjour (in French), demat (in Breton), latha math (in Gaelic), buenos dias (in Spanish), Dominus vobiscum (in Latin) and perhaps even salaam aleikum (in the Arabic dialects used in Andalusia).
Readers also should be aware that the Gatins family often had the habit of giving firstborn sons the same first and middle names. To simplify things, here is a reference list of who’s who in this particular line:
Joseph Gatins (1827-1905), my great-great-grandfather. A railroad clerk. Born Killybegs, Ireland, died Atlanta, Georgia.
Joseph Francis Gatins Sr. (1855-1936), my great-grandfather. Wall Street investor and entrepreneur. Built Georgian Terrace Hotel in Atlanta. Born Atlanta, died New York, New York.
Joseph Francis Gatins, Jr. (1882-1927), the one-armed grandfather, known as Joe. Sportsman and real estate investor. Born Atlanta, died Atlanta.
Joseph Francis Gatins III (1915-1983), my father, best known as Francis. World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Born Versailles, France, died Atlanta.
My grandmother, Eglé Gatins, always giving of her love for family, provided a wonderful road map to this reminiscence in the form of a brief oral history tape-recorded in 1976 and then in a much more sanitized, written memoir in 1988. Both recollections touched upon the highlights of her life, sometimes in exquisite, rich detail, and proved a wonderful guide to further research. Unless otherwise noted, all of her direct quotes in this book are from those two sources.
Joseph Gatins, 2009,
at Satolah, Georgia
Chapter 1
Wall Street Operator
The headline on the front page of The New York Times of April 24, 1910, was big and bold, its lengthy and detailed article stretching down the entire news page.
GATINS ARRESTED AS
BUCKETSHOP MAN
____________________
Reputed Backer of Wm. B. Price & Co. Surprised and Distressed When Taken In
____________________
KNOWN AS MILLIONAIRE
____________________
First Time an Officer’s Hand Was Ever Laid on His Shoulder, He Tells Prison Warden
The news had federal authorities listing Joseph F. Gatins Sr. as the “bankroll man” behind a string of unlawful bucket shops operating across the East Coast, under the banner of the Baltimore-based William B. Price & Co. My great-grandfather was taken to the Tombs that night and briefly lodged in cell 718, according to The Times and subsequent news articles in many other papers. He eventually posted a $5,000 bail bond and remained free for the next few years, which other articles of the day make clear were dedicated to fighting the charges.
Because of a typographical error, which listed his last name as Gaskins, he initially had eluded the federal dragnet that corralled some 29 other alleged coconspirators. Federal officers eventually caught up to him at a swanky New York apartment at 71 Central Park West, where, as The Times put it, he’d been living with his family in “quiet luxury.” He was re-indicted under the right name. He was 45 years old at the time. Newspapers in Washington, where the case was to be prosecuted, also had a field day with the bucket shop cases, and it became obvious federal authorities were feeding the press of the day. The Washington Star, (in an article of April 23, 1910), described Gatins as “reputed both here and in the South, where he has been a prominent figure, to be worth something like $10,000,000.” (That $10 million would be worth more than $228 million today.) The Washington Post the next day had him posting his bail in cash, a proceeding during which he appeared to “take his apprehension to heart.” He appeared “decidedly agitated during the examination,” the newspaper said.
Various newspapers up and down the East Coast then followed the conspiracy case through a tortuous legal chain of events in which the defendants and their lawyers, in their first trial in Washington, managed to have the case thrown out on grounds that the new federal Bucket Shop Law of 1909 violated their constitutional rights. The government appealed that ruling, however, and secured a reversal of the decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in November of 1911, which ordered a retrial.
What was a bucket shop anyway? My old journalistic instincts were piqued. Bucket shops essentially were private and fraudulent stock gambling establishments, which thrived in the days when Wall Street operated with little or no regulation. At the height of the Gilded Age, the term bucket shop referred to an unregulated form of gambling on the daily ups and downs of the stock market— on margin. The book Trade Like Jesse Livermore, described them this way: “A bucket shop was a place where one could play the market on 10 percent margin. Its atmosphere was more like an off track betting parlor than a broker’s office. The stock ticker spewed out the trades as they happened on the exchange, and the prices were recorded on the chalkboard. The rules were simple: Put up your 10 percent in cash, place a bet by buying a stock and receive a printed receipt for your purchase. Then sit back and watch the action. As soon as you lost 10 percent of the value of the stock, the house swooped in and took your money. Conversely, if the stock went up, you could cash in your ticket at will. The house won almost all of the time. It was usually a sucker play—with the customers being the suckers. They were simply bad stock pickers.”
Webster’s business dictionaries simply explain bucket shops as “fraudulent operations” in which orders to buy and sell are accepted but no execution takes place. “Instead, operators expect to profit when customers close out their position at a loss. The term [bucket shop] comes from the days when saloons sold small amounts of liquor in buckets. Brokers then spent a lot of time in bars.” My brother Martin heard it this way: The bars and drinking establishments where the stock gambling took place often “dropped a bucket” on the bars at the end of the trading day to signal the end of the gaming until the next day. The house, according to contemporary reports, usually was the winner because bucket shops often operated with two connections to Wall Street, a “fast wire,” and a “slow wire,” much as depicted in the 1973 movie, The Sting. Customers were referred to the slow telegraph results, while bucket shop operators, with a 15-minute head start on stock trades, were able to shut out bets that would have been unprofitable to the house. The practice was so widespread that the federal government and Congress had enacted a new law in 1909 making bucket shops illegal. And it was obvious that the feds were going to try to make an example of my great-grandfather and the others caught in their dragnet.
The conspiracy case, not insubstantial, had originated on April 2, 1910 with special federal agents assigned to the Justice Department (precursors to agents of the FBI) raiding interstate bucket shop operations in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Jersey City, Cincinnati and St. Louis, armed with warrants for arrest of 29 brokers and one telegraph operator. The investigative dragnet, of about 10 weeks duration, was based on wiretapping hundreds of brokerage messages that proved, or so the news reports asserted, that none of the bucket shops were placing bona fide securities trades. Eventually, the indictments were enlarged to take in Western Union, seemingly as part of the general trust busting, pro-business- regulation ways of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, William Howard Taft and, especially, Taft’s attorney general, George W. Wickersham. The political mood of the country at the time was to try to rein in its robber barons.
The news accounts make plain the bucket shop case defendants thought they had done nothing wrong. “This is only a play of the big fellows on the stock exchange to divert attention from themselves,” one defendant declared upon his arrest. The case faded from public view after the appeals court decision and Great- Grandfather Gatins is hardly mentioned again in the mass media in connection with bucket shops until he and several other defendants finally pleaded guilty and quietly paid a $9,000 fine, as recorded in a one-paragraph article in The Wall Street Journal of May 12, 1913. They thus avoided the two years of imprisonment also possible under the federal bucket shop conspiracy statute.
I never knew my great grandfather, but I’ll admit to being fascinated at finding the arrest article and then trying to find out more of his life in New York. Born in Atlanta, it had been relatively simple to track his climb from a modest boarding house during the Reconstruction era of the Deep South to more substantial quarters of the Gilded Age. If he had something of a shadowy reputation as a wheeler-dealer and stock trader in New York, he publicly had been regarded as a respected investor, builder and entrepreneur in Atlanta. Interestingly, especially to me as a former newspaperman, the three main daily newspapers in Atlanta where my great-grandfather got his start in business, apparently never followed the case involving one of their prominent native sons. They carried an early version of the bucket shop indictments—the “stock gambling” case, they called it—mentioning only a certain Joseph Gaskins of Baltimore. But neither The Atlanta Constitution nor The Atlanta Journal nor The Atlanta Georgian & News followed the case after the “bankroll man” had been properly identified. It was as if they did not want to mention the courtroom travails of a hometown boy who had made good in the financial world of New York. The criminal case against one of Atlanta’s native sons would have been hard to miss, given the extensive coverage it received in the major papers on the East Coast. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, they never publicly put two and two together while other, larger media outlets from Washington to New York provided extensive coverage of the bucket shop stories.
Almost simultaneous to the bucket shop developments, my great-grandfather had successfully furthered his other business interests, especially those in real estate in Atlanta, where he apparently maintained an unscathed business reputation. In particular, he had acquired valuable Atlanta property at the corner of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue, upon which he built the Georgian Terrace Hotel in 1910-11. He introduced it to the general public with a spectacular grand opening in 1912. The Terrace, one of the hottest properties in Atlanta in the early decades of the 20th Century, proved a cash cow and maintained the Gatins family for years and generations to come. That legacy was assured in February 1912, when Great-Grandfather Gatins formally placed the hotel property into a trust for the benefit of his three children. This also appears to have had the secondary benefit of insulating the property from the possibility of any bucket shop-related seizure by the U.S. government. The Atlanta Constitution, which carried an article about the trust’s establishment, noted at the time that Gatins’ ties to Atlanta had “laid the foundation of the fortune he has amassed in the east.”
The hotel property helped rank my great-grandfather and my grandfather among the largest real estate investors in the southern capital on the eve of the First World War. The extent of that family real estate fortune at the turn of the last century was re-captured in Franklin M. Garrett’s massive history of Atlanta, based on an inventory published by Forest and George Adair in 1914. My great-grandfather and grandfather are shown to have jointly held real estate appraised at $550,950, making them the 14th largest land investors in the town at that time. That half million dollars of land and improvements would be appraised in excess of $11.7 million in 2007 dollars. The appraisal sum also probably underestimates the true overall value of the holdings, as the Terrace was publicly estimated to be worth over $1 million two years previous.
That same year (1914), my great-grandfather is listed in the local city directory for Atlanta with an occupation simply listed as “Capitalist”—several light years from his first real job as a modest railroad clerk. No doubt this unusual job listing refers more to his business of raising and lending money and doing deals on Wall Street than to anything political. Other prominent businessmen in Georgia used the same job description at the time. By that time, he was well on his way to putting away large amounts of cash with the U.S. Trust bank in New York and using those sums to leverage more, often by making private loans to friends in the business world. One such loan was made to the Georgia Power Co., then a small electricity generating enterprise, which was hard pressed at the turn of the 20th Century to complete a series of hydroelectric dams and generating stations in the far reaches of mountainous north Georgia along the Tallulah River in Rabun County. That power was needed to run the new trolley cars that had started crisscrossing Atlanta. This loan, confirmed by a source close to the family, was worth approximately $50,000 (about ten times that much in today’s dollars) and paid back with interest, according to the files of the Atlanta lawyer who handled the paperwork. At the same time, he kept on making his name on Wall Street as an astute stock speculator, often by making money from others’ losses, that is by selling stock “short,” according to one of his granddaughters. In that regard, he was no different from today’s hedge fund operators and day traders.
I was very intrigued to discover this entrepreneur in the family tree and unearthing what details could be found. What an interesting character, I thought. Back when I was in the news business, assigned to cover a statehouse, we called mining of public records “doing black book.” In this case, I was pleasantly surprised to find how rich a vein of family history was there to be mined. My great-grandfather obviously had lived a full life in interesting times.
One chronicler of the day noted that a good bit of Wall Street speculation occurred in after-hours negotiating that took place around the large square bar of The Waldorf Hotel, which opened in 1897, later called the Waldorf-Astoria. There at the bar “one often saw ‘Joe’ Gatins, an Atlanta millionaire, who was rumored to be a heavy operator in the cotton market,” records a book about this era. According to that author, he was in fine company. Perhaps the most famous patron of the bar was J. Pierpont Morgan, the great financier, surrounded by politicians, wildcatters and stock speculators of every stripe who often gathered there after the New York Stock Exchange closed. From 5 to 8 p.m., in particular, it was as if the whole of Wall Street had moved uptown for a continuing stock exchange session, with “men betting on how stocks would perform the next day. In one discreet corner a ticker kept clicking off news. Here market pools were often formed. Here were to be found men who were willing to bet on anything, and to any amount, financiers and market operators, with names that gained newspaper front pages every day or so, clustered about the tables, or joined in the maggotlike surge that squirmed for a foothold on the substantial brass rail that ran along the bottom of the counter.” There, they quaffed potent cocktails with fanciful, long-forgotten names like the “Baby Titty”—composed of equal parts anisette, Crème Yvette, and whipped cream, topped with a red cherry.
“A deal would start by one man’s reading the news one way, and another in another fashion. One would come in the office feeling decidedly bearish. Another would talk bullish. The bear would decide he wanted to get rid of a lot of steel [stock], or something else he had on hand. The bull would take him up. They would watch the ticker, agree on the price at a certain point, and, bingo! with the exception of the stock exchange proceeding, the deal was made. Then, head to the bar to help make American history. Men staked fortunes there; they formed pools; they plotted to corner markets,” that chronicler said.
My great-grandfather died 10 years before I was born, but this bucket shop financier—and his estate—were to play an important role in my own grandfather’s life and make it possible to live a lifestyle that brought him into contact with international society, and make for an improbable union with Eglé, a young woman in Paris. He simply put his children and grandchildren on easy street. And eventually, like a hand reaching out from the graves at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, the long reach of his legacy would link grandmother and her only child, my father, back to Atlanta.
Chapter 2
Partying at the Ritz
What might a young, international playboy and sportsman with plenty of money do for fun in his free time in the advent to World War I? Well, why not head to Paris for a party like so many others? Thus did my grandfather, Joseph F. Gatins, Jr. become part of the crowd of Americans descending on the French capital during the summer of 1914.
Despite the acrid scent of oncoming war, there was hardly a better place for international socializing and merriment that summer than Paris’ famed Hotel Ritz, a favorite watering hole of world travelers. It had opened its doors to almost instantaneous acclaim in 1898, and done so well that it virtually doubled in size by 1913. This was the luxurious retreat for the very rich (and the would-be rich) of America, where Rothschilds rubbed elbows with Morgans, where Goulds and Vanderbilts were mainstay visitors and where countless others came to do a little business under the observant eye of a youthful writer, Marcel Proust. It also was the place to be for New York financiers of somewhat lesser renown, brokers and bankers and Wall Street financiers who provided the necessary lubricant of international commerce. One of these men, investor James C. Brady, owner of an expansive horse stable in New Jersey, always seemed to travel with an entourage. One member of the Brady crowd at the Ritz that summer was a young real estate investor and horseman from Atlanta and New York, a well-traveled and well-heeled 32-year-old international sportsman and aficionado of French history, Joseph Francis Gatins, Jr. He was a member of that class of idle rich spawned from America’s Gilded Age, largely living off of his father’s considerable fortune, well-traveled in Europe and the Far East, and still an eligible bachelor.
As things were done in that era, he was properly introduced to a lovely and intelligent French girl 10 years his junior, Eglé Marie de Villelume-Sombreuil, who eventually became my grandmother. By chance, she had enough experience and savoir-faire to speak passable English. They were attracted to each other. “He was the handsomest man I had ever met,” Eglé recalled many years later. “He was very handsome. He was short, nice-looking. He was very intelligent, very well read and had studied in England. I met him at a big party at the Ritz. And very quickly, we were engaged.”
“He pleased me very much. He had beautiful blue eyes,” Eglé recalled. But she also felt sorry for her fiancé. “He had lost one arm. That was probably one of the reasons I married him.”
I discovered two versions of how my grandfather lost his right arm. The first had him taking a tumble while running on a set of stairs as a youth of 16 and losing his arm from that accident. The second, which seems more plausible, had him receiving a smallpox vaccination before his arm was set in a cast, and the vaccination spot becoming so infected underneath the cast that it necessitated amputation.
His recollection of meeting Eglé is not recorded for posterity but the available record suggests clearly that he was very much intrigued by Eglé and her connections to a rich French history. As early as July 1914, he’d sent a cable to Atlanta to announce his intentions, which were duly recorded in a brief article in The Atlanta Constitution of July 10. “Joseph Gatins, Jr., wins bride in Paris,” the headline said. The article went on to relate that Gatins Jr., “one of the most prominent young men socially and otherwise” in Atlanta, was soon to wed Eglé, daughter of the countess de Sombreuil of Paris, “one of the most aristocratic of French families.”
“His bride-to-be is a descendant of a family which for years has been prominent in French history,” the article concluded, giving clear indication of Joe’s interest in his love. The article also reflected the fascination the Atlanta papers had with this continuing family story. In contrast to the seemingly studied silence with which it had greeted my great-grandfather’s legal troubles in Washington and New York, Atlanta’s newspapers had a heyday covering and eventually chronicling the social lives of Grandmother and Grandfather and, eventually, their progeny. The Journal’s social pages and later, those of The Atlanta Constitution, made it a habit to chronicle many of the comings and goings of the new couple, and, much later, that of their son, Joseph Francis Gatins III, my father, and then those of his children. In many cases, the early coverage dwelt almost ad nauseam on Grandmother Eglé’s connection to French nobility, and that of her late father, the Count of Villelume-Sombreuil. Accordingly, many of the articles erroneously referred to Eglé as “the countess,” although under the Napoleonic French Code, such titles only transfer to the male line and apply to the women only if they were married to the noble himself. Nevertheless, the post-wedding headline from a Journal article was, “Marriage of Mr. Joseph Gatins and Comtesse de Sombreuil in Paris.” That was just the beginning of a long newspaper love affair with the Gatins family, which apparently fascinated Atlanta society and its society columnists.
My grandmother was a direct descendant of one of France’s best-known families, several of whose members, unreconstructed Royalists, were guillotined during the French Revolution. Another, René de Madec, became a minor French historical figure for his exploits as a French corsair in India during the late 1700s. A sailor from Quimper in Brittany, he’d gotten his start on the high seas in the slave trade to Santo Domingo, then translated that experience into what he hoped would be more lucrative efforts as a privateer in India, sanctioned by the French government.
At any rate, whatever the reasons for their mutual attraction, Grandfather Gatins was interested enough in Mademoiselle de Villelume-Sombreuil to pursue a whirlwind Paris courtship that culminated in marriage but a few months later. It was a period of fancy dress balls, parties and fabulous gourmet food all coming together to mark the end of the Belle Époque. Like the scent of the sea that previews hurricanes, even hundreds of miles inland, the odor of rich French perfume and gunpowder was mixing in the air France breathed that summer. Haute couture had women wearing impossibly intricate, large hats and fanciful evening gowns, with tight bodices and generous amounts of tulle and lace, which were soon to be traded in for the more sensible frocks of wartime. Restaurants like the Tour d’Argent were still making a theatrical production of gourmet food, selling pressed and numbered “Canards au Sang.” The spring of 1914 was a fidgety time for all of France, anxious and prideful as it girded for inevitable war against the hated Krauts. The entire country was itching to extract revenge for the crippling defeat at the hands of the German forces at Sedan and the loss of the territories of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. It was poised to take on the Kaiser. Whether Socialist or Royalist, whether drinking Veuve Cliquot or common mousseux, nothing less than victory, won with flair and panache, would do to erase the long and highly divisive national nightmare occasioned by the Dreyfus Affair. (The Dreyfus controversy had roiled and divided French society during the period 1894-1900 after a Jewish French Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongfully accused of being a spy for Germany. The affair thoroughly divided the French into two camps, those who supported Dreyfus (Dreyfusards) and those against (anti- Dreyfusards). It also exposed a virulent and long-standing French anti-Semitism that only worsened in the period during and between the two world wars). But rather than focus on dark matters and warlike threats and controversies, all of Paris strutted and fanned its tail feathers that spring in anticipation of a glorious summer. It seemed as if the entire known world, and its upper crust in particular, descended on the French capital for the season.
And if there were any misgivings about the oncoming alliance between a young demure woman from a family that was French to the bone and a clan of brash Irish-American immigrants from far-off Atlanta and New York, these seemed to be erased by parties galore at the Hotel Ritz and outings to the Bois de Boulogne. Eglé and Joe seemingly were swept up in the martial fervor accompanying the start of the First World War. There was no engagement period to speak of and theirs was not a textbook wedding made for the social pages. No wedding-day photographs exist today, no engagement or wedding ring. There was “no question of wearing a white dress,” the bride recalled decades later, as the war officially had been declared in France less than five days before the ceremony. “I thus received the benediction in a blue suit,” my grandmother said.
Nor is it known if Eglé’s widowed mother and her current suitor, a Swiss banker named Henri Fischer, attended or not, although my grandparents were married in the same church her mother been married in the first time, the parish of St. Philippe du Roule. (Eglé’s birth father had shot himself to death in 1912.) “She [my mother] thought it was crazy!” Grandmother Eglé recalled in a 1976 interview. “All my family, the Bretons especially, wrote that, ‘you married an American, it’s nearly [as bad] as an English.’”
Crazy or not, Eglé, it also seems clear, might have been proceeding with the hurried marriage out of a sense of social propriety—and to clear the re-marriage decks for her own mother’s designs with Fischer. The Villelume-Sombreuil family formally had been introduced to Fischer as a possible match for Eglé on a transatlantic boat ride to or from New York around 1912. Fischer, though, found himself transfixed by the mother more than the daughter. As family relations have handed the story down to current generations of Gatins descendants, French society would have looked askance at the mother remarrying before her adult daughter made her own match, a situation solved by the appearance of a well-heeled American. So, it seems our grandmother might have married the Irish-American stranger who precipitously came into her life out of some sense of self-sacrifice for her own mother’s happiness. Plus, she really loved the United States, having lived in New York for several years as a teenager.
The extended Gatins family in New York and Atlanta, meanwhile, did not attend the wedding in Paris, “being prevented from crossing (over to Europe) by the unsettled conditions,” as a contemporary article from The Atlanta Journal put it. In their stead, the bride and groom each brought two witnesses to the mayor’s office of the 8th Arrondissement, where French law required that a civil marriage ceremony also be held (on August 5, 1914, the same day as the church marriage). Grandfather Gatins brought two acquaintances as witnesses, probably friends from New York or drinking buddies from the Ritz: Harris Williams, a 25-yearold industrialist, and Charles Loeb, 21, a lawyer admitted before the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Grandmother Eglé was flanked by Régis Masson de Torcy, 65, a veteran of the War of 1870 against the Germans, and Charles Henri Lefrancois, 49, a veteran French cavalry officer. The wedding certificate reflects that there was no pre-nuptial contract. Rather than travel abroad for a honeymoon, the couple moved temporarily into the sumptuous Hotel Ritz as all Europe rushed headlong to armed conflict. By their wedding day, August 5, 1914, the assembled armies of Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and England all had been mobilized, poised for the inexorable war that both sides, especially France and Germany, had been expecting for months. As history well records, the immediate excuse for world war was the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo on June 28 of that year. By July 30, both Russia and Austria had mobilized. Two days later, Germany did the same, and its army breached Luxembourg’s border at Trois Vierges on its way to helpless, neutral Belgium.
Barbara Tuchman’s fascinating chronicle records it thus: “At Armenonville, rendezvous of the haut-monde in the Bois de Boulogne, tea dancing suddenly stopped when the manager stepped forward, silenced the orchestra and announced: “Mobilization has been ordered. It begins at midnight. Play the Marseillaise.’” Much of France went to war that summer as if marching to the beat of a full-dress parade, according to Tuchman. “French soldiers in red trousers and big-shirted dark blue coats, buttoned back at the corners,” marched from Paris with song on their lips. “Cavalry regiments of cuirassiers with glistening metal breastplates and long black horsehair tails hanging down from their helmets were conscious of no anachronism.” Eglé, while in the midst of marriage preparations, also was swept up by this flurry of proud, martial display, as her younger brother, Charles de Villelume-Sombreuil, nicknamed Charlic, was shipped out with his unit, the 27th Regiment of Dragoons (i.e., cavalrymen riding to war on horseback) on August 2, only three days before the wedding. Recollection of that movement was writ large in Eglé’s memory, almost as large as the unit’s pathetic return to Paris less than a month later.
“One evening, in Paris... my mother got a telephone call from a woman who told her, ‘I’ve got the café in front of the Dragoons’ quarters. If you want to see them tonight, I’ll save you a table.’ We rushed to Versailles. The colonel had received orders to leave clandestinely and at night, so as to not frighten the populace. He was an extraordinary man. His response: ‘I don’t give a damn. I’ll probably be killed in a little bit and I want to make a real show of my departure.’
“They left, the band beating at the front with a fanfare of the most martial music, all the Dragoons with their splendid helmets, their rifles slung at their shoulders and their lance in their hands. It was a very beautiful show, and very moving. Everybody came to the windows. It was gorgeous. Oh, they were beautiful! When I think of it, tears still come to my eyes.”
Contemporary photos of such martial parade spectacles suggest the Dragoons were woefully unprepared for the carnage that awaited them. Their parade helmets, shiny brass topped by a horsehair plume, seemed derived from the time of the Roman legions. Their metal breastplates, equally shiny and resplendent, appeared more for show than protection. In these pictures, not a one carried a sidearm, much less a rifle. Their main weapon: A personal épée. Contrast that march-to-war spectacle with that of the unit’s return less than a month later, after the German juggernaut had easily crunched through Belgium and pushed to within 50 miles of Paris.
“Without news of my brother, I was very anxious. One day, a telephone call. Mother was coming to see me at the little restaurant in front of Longchamps. With some difficulty, we found a taxi and soon found ourselves face to face with what was left of the 27th Regiment of Dragoons,” Eglé recalled. “The men were tired, their uniforms in tatters, their poor horses all skinny. Those people were in rags. The Dragoons had been forced to fight as infantrymen. Most of their officers had been killed.” Just how futile their effort was is captured in this vignette: The Dragoons, on one occasion, had mounted a cavalry charge—against a squadron of German airplanes!
Tuchman describes the travails of another cavalry unit in the 9th Cavalry Division. “The cavalry, once so shiny in polished boots and bright uniforms, now stained and muddy, sway in their saddles, dazed with fatigue.
“’The men’s heads hang with weariness,’ one witness recalled. ‘They only halfsee where they are going; they live as if in a dream. At halts the famished and broken-down horses even before unsaddling, plunge at the hay and devour it voraciously. We no longer sleep; we march by night and face the enemy by day.’”
Nonetheless, remnants of Charlic’s 27th Regiment were attached to the troops still garrisoned in Paris and sent back to the front by taxi to try to stop the Germans on the Marne River. As Tuchman points out, the desperate counteroffensive on the Marne River was made possible only by the commandeering of 600 taxis in Paris, each making two round trips to the front, carrying five soldiers each time. “They only stayed a few days to get some food and then they returned to the trenches. There never again was any question of marshalling the cavalry,” my grandmother said.
By the time the Marne counter-offensive took hold, “It was time to go home,” Joseph F. Gatins Jr. told his young new bride. The couple had already been forced to move out of the Hotel Ritz, which turned its first floor into a military hospital in late August 1914, and then closed by September. After staying some few days at the Ritz after their wedding, the Gatinses moved to another hotel on Avenue Montaigne, then for a few weeks to Great Britain before departing for good for the United States. By that time the newlyweds were already bumping into the harsh reality that proved to be their union. Just how difficult that marriage proved to be is graphically, if incompletely, related in Eglé’s oral history and memoir, and also in the long memories of those who knew them in Atlanta in the early days of their marriage. In today’s parlance, they would be a textbook example of a dysfunctional couple whose tensions and hurts eventually could not be masked by veneers of civility and social standing. For myself, uncovering these facts was not altogether pleasant, but it explained much of what was to come later. Dysfunction has coursed through Gatins family genes. The fruit of this research was not quite as sweet as discovering that my great-grandfather was a swashbuckling deal maker on Wall Street.
Chapter 3
“I Don’t Want You”
My Gatins grandfather and grandmother initially approached their new lives in the United States as any normal newlyweds, disembarking in New York in early October 1914. Eglé was introduced to the rest of the Gatins family, which included the new groom’s parents (the bucket shop and Wall Street financier and his wife Kate), his brother Ben (a pugnacious, polo-playing bon-vivant) and his sister Mary (“a beautiful young lady who had married an old judge who worked with her father, and from whom she was separated”). The clan received her warmly.
“The Gatinses were so affectionate. Mrs. Gatins was wonderful and so was Mr. Gatins,” Eglé said of her new in-laws, although her husband’s parents would have preferred and had expected an expansive wedding ceremony and reception. The nuptials had perforce been very small, Eglé said, because of the war and because “I’d seen Charlic and his regiment leaving.” But Gatins family regrets at not having had a society-style wedding apparently were more than offset by learning that Eglé shared their religious faith. “The Gatinses were very much Catholic,” she recalled. “So, one of the things that pleased them was when they learned I was Catholic.” Before Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church was characterized by rigidity: Mandatory attendance at Sunday mass and Holy Days, repeated confession of all sin, communion, no meat on Fridays, fasting (for adults) at Lent and a richly textured, superstitious belief in the healing and protective powers of scapulars, rosaries, religious medals, prayer cards, indulgences, votive offerings, multiple angels, saints and the Holy Ghost. In America, these precepts were codified in a slim, didactic volume called the “Baltimore Catechism,” first published in 1891, aimed at placing and keeping one’s soul in a state of grace. Eglé, who had helped teach catechism to little children when she was growing up in Brittany, was right at home in that faith.
My grandparents then stayed a “little while” in New York, a bustling business and cultural center of more than two million residents, many of them new immigrants from all over Europe. Manhattan was known to both of them. He had moved there in 1901, even before leaving the University of Georgia and she knew it well enough from the years 1909-11, when, as a 17-year-old, she had steamed past the Statue of Liberty to accompany her mother following the separation of her parents. Her mother, a vivacious and gregarious Parisiènne, had opened a highly successful millinery store at the corner of East 30th Street and 5th Avenue, which sold dresses and hats to that era’s fashion mavens. Mother and daughter (and, briefly, brother Charlic) had lived nearby at 523 West 31st, not far from what was then a new Penn Station.
The new couple then joined James C. Brady, the New York moneyman who had counted Joseph F. Gatins Jr. in his entourage in Paris the previous summer, and his wife, Victoria Perry, at Gladstone, their property at Monmouth Beach, New Jersey. There are two versions of what happened next. Eglé recorded the first, a raw version of events, on audiotape in 1976. That recollection bluntly presages the distress and rejection she was to experience from a bad-tempered, whiskeybesotted husband. The second, more sanitized version was captured in her written memoir about 12 years later.
Here’s the first: “We went to see Jim Brady and then Joe got very drunk one day and left for Atlanta. He did not agree with his friend Jim Brady and so he said, ‘I’m going back to Atlanta. I don’t want you. Stay wherever you want, stay with my mother if you want—you get along very well. Stay with my aunt.’ And I stayed with my mother-in-law in New York, who was very sweet.”
Here is the second version, well-sanitized: “Joe was in a hurry to return to Atlanta, but my mother-in-law wanted to keep me [in New York] for a family reunion. He thus left alone. I rejoined him several days later.”
What Eglé never spoke of at all is that her new husband probably behaved horribly during the first flush of this new marriage, so horribly that it was common currency in Atlanta decades later than he’d been “unfaithful to his wife on their honeymoon.” I was astounded when I first heard this story, disbelieving, ashamed and angry that a grandfather might have behaved so. This was truly repellant, priapic behavior. Did Eglé have any inkling of this monstrous moral turpitude? If she did, she never talked about it. Her oral and written recollections tend more to describe the life of a dutiful, loyal and concerned wife. While still in the New York area, she had received a telephone call in which it was suggested she had better come to Atlanta quickly. Her husband had gone on such a bender that he’d been hospitalized. “I learned that he was really sick and in a clinic,” she said.
Yet, the worry and concern over her husband’s state seemingly was off set by her first experience of the deep South, an experience that foreshadowed a long love affair with Atlanta and its people and the many women friends she made there, if not with the man who had brought her to this brave new world. Outwardly, her new home could not have been more different than Paris: Its population approached a mere 155,000 compared to the French capital’s three million-plus residents; recorded Paris history began in the 3rd Century A.D., while Atlanta did not exist as a metropolis before the 1800s. Yet, the social milieu she moved within was remarkably similar: Society in both cities was consumed with maintaining appearances of propriety and class and, for Eglé in particular, putting on a brave public face.
“It was a 22-hour trip in those marvelous Pullmans,” she recalled. “Upon waking up in the morning, I was won over by the feeling of the South, the cotton fields, the Negroes coming home from work with a song on their lips.” If she was cruelly disappointed upon her arrival at Atlanta’s old Terminal Station “to not find my husband there,” she simultaneously found herself embraced by the upper crust of a little railroad crossroads state capital down in the middle of nowhere, whose denizens then, as today, appreciated a class act.
Grandmother was met at the station and picked up by two of her husband’s aunts, Julia Gatins Murphy, nicknamed “Dearie,” and Mamie Gatins, a spinster, who brought her to her apartment at the Georgian Terrace Hotel in a big Packard. “I had never seen such a long car in all my life,” Eglé said. The Georgian Terrace had been built in 1910-12 by her father-in-law, the Wall Street financier whose fortune sustained his children and eventually, his grandson. The Atlanta Journal turned her arrival in town into a fanciful tale. Here’s the contemporary headline and article:
JOS. GATINS JR.
HERE; COUNTESS-WIFE
HELPS
TO NURSE HIM
The countess Eglé de Sombreuil, wife of Joseph Gatins Jr., is at the bedside of her husband in the Georgian Terrace Thursday helping to nurse him through a sudden illness that has alarmed his friends.
The Countess, who was one of the best-known figures in the social life of Paris before she became the Atlanta man’s bride, hurriedly packed a grip and cut short her stay at the palatial home of James C. Brady in Monmouth Beach, N.J. to be with her husband. She has been at his bedside constantly since her arrival Wednesday and has turned down scores of pressing invitations from Atlanta society eager to honor her.
The countess has expressed herself as extremely pleased with Atlanta, and surprised and delighted with its metropolitan character. Even if it were not for the illness of her husband, she would be indulging in little social gayety, as she is consumed with anxiety over the fate of her brother, Captain Sombreuil, who has been reported killed in the battle of the Aisne.
As it turned out, Charlic had not been killed, only taken prisoner. As it also turned out, Eglé was forced into accepting one social engagement immediately upon arrival in Atlanta, the memory of which was indelibly imprinted upon her psyche. “They [the two sisters, Dearie and Mamie] had gotten me a reservation in a nice apartment [at the Georgian Terrace Hotel]—you know that apartment, the one with the round turret where we all lived—full of flowers. I told them that as soon as I’d taken a bath, I would go see Joe. They wanted to drive me but I told them I could manage to find a taxi to go see him. Dearie then told me, ‘You must meet Atlanta society. We’ll come get you at 5 o’clock to bring you to the Thé Dansant at the Driving Club. They know Joe, it doesn’t matter. But they must see you.’” (The Piedmont Driving Club officially had been established only 20 years previous, but had already attracted much of Atlanta society to its membership rolls by 1914.)
“I explained that this could wait until Joe felt better, but they insisted: ‘No, you must come. So, I then participated in the most ridiculous scene of all my life. Dearie, holding me by the arm, took me around to most of the tables, saying as follows: ‘I present you my niece, the countess.’ I tried to tell her that in France women only receive such titles from their husbands, after their marriage. But there was nothing doing. ‘Your father was a count, thus you’re a countess.’” She also was assigned an escort, a friend of her husband’s named Joe Brown Connelly. “He was the nicest thing.” Many others also asked her to dance, “but I told them with my country at war, I don’t feel much like dancing. If I live to be a hundred years old, I’ll never forget the Thé Dansant.”
She begged off having dinner with the aunts and then was dropped off at the Terrace, where she was visited by two of her husband’s intimate friends, Albert and Edna Thornton. “I loved them the minute I met them,” Eglé recalled. “They remained great friends until their deaths.” Her husband was discharged from the clinic the next day and began to introduce his bride to his many friends, as life returned to some semblance of normalcy.
It was in many ways a life of ease and grandeur, much as she would have had in France had her father not committed suicide, and brought down the stigma of disapproval on the Villelume-Sombreuil family from both society and members of its rigid Catholic faith. In Atlanta, Eglé learned to drive a car, a small Model T Ford. She took her first golf lessons at the Druid Hills Country Club, which, in keeping with the racial tenor of the times, Grandmother recalled as having its greens maintained by gangs of convicts hobbled by ball and chain. She had a small dog and walked it around the Georgian Terrace neighborhood. The upper crust of Atlanta would drive up and down Peachtree Street, greeting friends and neighbors who lived on that still-fabled avenue. Families and friends would call on each other, sometimes unannounced, on Sunday afternoons, leaving embossed calling cards if no one answered the door. In Atlanta, use of these cards entailed an elaborate, unwritten subtext of polite messages, depending on which corner of the card was turned down in which specific way.
“Atlanta was a charming place, very much... Southern, you know, from the Sacred Heart [Church] to the Georgian Terrace, lovely homes there. You’d see all your friends rocking on their porches... and up above 14th Street, further up Peachtree, there was nothing. It was really in the country to go to Paces Ferry Road. You really thought you were going to the end of the world. And everybody knew each other. At the Driving Club, there was nobody you didn’t know. It’s not the same thing nowadays,” she said in the 1976 interview.
The Gatinses often were invited to sumptuous lunches at the home of Julia “Dearie” Gatins Murphy and John Edgar Murphy, the latter already well on his way to becoming one of Atlanta’s most respected banker-broker-businessmen. As Eglé recalled, he was the founding president of Lowry Bank, which eventually became the First National Bank of Atlanta. “They lived in a pretty house on Peachtree surrounded by a magnificent garden lining 13th and 14th Streets,” Eglé recalled. “Invitations to their Sunday brunch were much sought after—and they fed you in abundance, with four or five vegetables.
“Joe and I were often invited,” she remembered. “They had excellent Negro servants. Their cook was one of the best in town. The chauffeur and the butler were simply perfect. And there was a certain ‘first maid,’ Laura, who ruled the roost. Sometimes the lunches were so huge that they’d be held in the ballroom on the top floor!” The only wrinkle to such opulence and hospitality came in the form of Laura’s annoying habit of “inundating you with her vaporizer. For those like me who did not like perfume, it was really disagreeable.” But the lunches were memorable, and colored her initial experience in Atlanta. “They’d give those delicious lunches with the side vegetables. I adored Atlanta.”
At the same time, there is no mention anywhere in Grandmother’s memoir or her oral history of the homegrown Dreyfus-like affair that roiled Atlanta and all of America in 1915. This entailed the mob lynching of the Jewish business executive Leo Frank. (Georgia holds the dubious distinction of being the state whose citizens, mostly white, illegally lynched the second-highest number of persons, mostly black, in the post-Civil War era—458 all told. The last such lynching occurred in 1946.)
In like fashion, Eglé never makes any mention of the “big fire” that gutted 300 acres of Atlanta real estate in 1917 and destroyed almost 2,000 homes between downtown and Ponce de Leon Avenue, near where the new couple lived at the time. The conflagration only was checked when fire crews used dynamite to blow the blaze back. Her mention of current events appears strictly limited to matters related to the World War, rather than social issues, which seems strange to me in retrospect. Why was she so oblivious to what was going on around her?
As a new bride, Eglé appeared to prefer remembering what good times did occur, as with her fond recollection of Baltimore, where the young couple moved in early 1915, probably as early as January. Joe had gotten a job as an oil-and-gas investment advisor with Alex. Brown & Sons, a brokerage house in Maryland, according to family lore but that cannot be substantiated today. He pursued one of his favorite hobbies, horseback riding, joining the exclusive Elkridge Fox Hunting Club of Baltimore County. Despite having lost his right arm, my grandfather had learned to ride and turned into an accomplished steeplechase rider, a sport he pursued in New York and on Long Island and almost certainly at his friend Jim Brady’s expansive horse stables in New Jersey and, for several years before his marriage, in the hunt country of Melton-Mowbray, England. The couple was quickly absorbed and lionized by Baltimore society, it seems, but they were not above playing a bit of social one-upsmanship with Baltimore society, many of whom dated their antecedents to America’s pre-Revolutionary era.
“One day, during a dinner, when all the these people were telling tales about how they arrived to America on the Mayflower, Joe told them: ‘My family came from Ireland during the potato famine, but my wife’s people date back to the Crusades!’ This really impressed the [Baltimore] people, most of whom didn’t really know what it meant.” Eglé remembered this period in Baltimore as the most peaceful and enjoyable period of her brief, conjugal life.
Chapter 4
“Life Was Intolerable”
Grandmother Eglé’s lovely, peaceful interlude in Baltimore did not last long.
“Our pleasant life lasted until spring [of 1915],” she recalled. “But one day, Joe insulted his boss, who showed him the door. I was pregnant. Joe decided that his child must be born in France—a huge error. We thus left for France.” The real reasons for my grandfather’s decision to have his child born in France remain vague. There are no records to indicate what he was thinking at the time or why he wished his first child to be born in a country that was so deeply mired in the trench carnage of World War I. The United States was still about two years away from joining the conflict, and the loss of his right arm made it impossible for Joe to play any military role. His decision to have the baby born in France was most likely linked to his obvious desire to forge and maintain links to the French side of the family and the nobility that he and Atlanta society thought came with it. This decision later became a significant citizenship issue for their son, both during and after World War II. But in 1915, the main order of business was to have a healthy baby born in France, which occurred on October 8. Eglé gave birth at home, in a temporary residence at 32 rue du Peintre Lebrun, in Versailles, at four in the morning. In attendance was a midwife, Camille Chevalier, who attested to his birth, “the father being absent.” Where was the new father? Bending his elbow.
“I once asked Grandmother if she had known that Mr. Gatins was an alcoholic before marrying,” her granddaughter and namesake, Eglé Gatins Weiland, said. “She recalled that at our father’s birth she sent a message to the barman at the Ritz asking that he inform her husband that she had given him a son—so she found out pretty quickly!” In fact, it seems clear that Grandmother learned of her husband’s problems with strong drink early in the marriage, given that he’d gotten “so drunk” at the Brady home in New Jersey and been hospitalized after a drinking binge in Atlanta in 1914. Years later, Eglé recalled what it was like to live with an inebriate, as drunks were called in the early days of the 20th Century in America: “He was quite a gay blade... and a drunkard. When he didn’t drink, he was charming. For many people, when they’re not drunk, they’re charming.” But in 1915, the new wife and mother, having given her husband a son born in France, was apparently more ready to see his charms than his faults.
The couple remained in France for several months, as French and German forces continued to battle each other to a draw in the butchery of the trenches. Joseph Francis Gatins III was baptized on January 15, 1916, at the St. Philippe du Roule parish where his parents were married. The couple returned to the States in February 1916, after a terrible winter steamboat crossing from Bordeaux, to try to make a go of the marriage.
My father, nicknamed Mitou, (the “little one,” in French), had a nurse from France to attend to his every need, a young and striking Alsatian named Cecile, who quickly learned to speak English. Faded album photos show Francis playing in sandboxes, attending kindergarten at Washington Seminary, swinging his mother’s golf clubs and reading children’s books while sitting in the rocking chairs of the Georgian Terrace Hotel. The new family first had moved into the Terrace and soon thereafter to a nearby rented home at 583 Peachtree Street where, in between the new father’s drinking bouts, it appears the young couple and the new baby sought to establish themselves as a normal family. Eglé learned to keep house, with the aid of household help borrowed from the Georgian Terrace, of which her husband was already a part owner.