Francis Alexandre (1809-1889), my wife’s second great-grandfather, founded the Alexandre steamship company. He had three sons. One son, James Joseph Alexander (1844-1894), my wife’s first great grand uncle, continued making a fortune in the business. He married Nathalie Edsall, a distant cousin of Lady Randolph Churchill and of Winston Churchill. James died, and his widow married Paul Russell Bonner.
James Alexandre’s son, Jerome (1886-1925), was therefore the first cousin twice removed of my wife. He was named after the Jerome family through which he was related to the Churchills. He would inherit $1,500,000 from his father (about $40,000,000 in 2015 dollars) when he reached twenty-one.
Mr. Bonner ran a leather belting firm, Bonner and Barnewell, on Cortlandt St. in Manhattan. There he employed the lovely stenographer Violet Adelaide Oakley, who was the daughter of George Oakley, a real estate dealer in Washington Heights. She had studied at a normal school and worked at Mr. Bonner’s personal assistant.
Jerome entered Princeton, and as Mr. Bonner later explained,
“When he was home for Christmas he met Miss Oakley in my office and got to talking with her.”
Jerome dropped out of Princeton when he was a sophomore and in a desultory way worked in Bonner’s office. He soon after eloped with Miss Oakley and married her at the Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church on 130th St. on March 15, 1906.
His mother was a bit nonplussed. She told the newspapers:
“Jerome is always so impulsive”
“It is perfectly true that Jerome is married. Why he should not have told us first I don’t know. There was no occasion for keeping it secret, but he is an impulsive boy, and perhaps he thought it would be more romantic.”
“I’m taking a mother’s interest in the young couple, of course, and I have invited them to come out and live with us. I have never met Miss Oakley, but I understand she is a very sweet girl, and I will be glad to receive her. My husband knows her, of course. He has no objection to the marriage, and I have none, except that I should have wished that Jerome had been married in a somewhat different way.”
“He has a very romantic temperament and needs an anchor.”
And added
“I might have told him how difficult it is for a man when he marries out of his own set to have the society that know him accept his wife.”
Mr. Bonner told the newspapers that Miss Oakley
“is a very fine young woman – a gentlewoman in every way estimable. I think a great deal of her. She became my office manager a year ago. She has a remarkably good education. I never asked about her family, but I should guess that they are well bred persons who have had money and have less now.”
Jerome was obviously marrying beneath himself financially and his mother and step-father were not overjoyed.
Jerome, married, 21, and very rich, continued to be impulsive. On March 30, 1907, Jerome was arrested for driving at Seventy-Sixth Street and Riverside Drive at the hazardous rate of twenty-four miles per hour. He gave his occupation as “capitalist,” produced a $100 bill ($2,500 in 2015 dollars) as bail, and said that the District Attorney Jerome was his cousin. Later in 1907 he raced his Thomas car from New York to Cape Charles in a record 19 ½ hours.
That year he came into his estate. He announced his determination to solve a family mystery.
On the night of August 29, 1905 burglars had crossed the grounds of the Alexandre estate, Nirvana,without rousing three vicious Great Danes and entered the house that had thirteen people – family, guests, servants – sleeping. They took a 800 lbs. safe with Mrs. Bonner’s jewels worth $20,000 (about $600,000 in 2015 dollars), many of which had been given by her late husband, James Alexandre. Detectives theorized that four men had entered the house, knew exactly where the safe was on the second floor, carried the safe down the stairs and to the shore and placed it in a waiting vessel. Several family members and eight domestics were in the house and men were sleeping in the outbuildings. Nothing else of value was taken, although the house was full of silver and expensive bric-a-brac.
A note written on fine, perfumed paper was left behind. It read:
“Dear Madam: You will be surprised to find your valuables taken, but in finding this note keep it in secrecy, as we are not to be trifled with. If our freedom is taken your place will be in ruins soon after.
Below that was a cross and “A warning.”
Flush with money in 1907 Jerome announced
“I have always intended to discover how that safe was taken from Nirvana. Now that I am in a potion to conduct an independent investigation, I will engage a corps of private detectives and go over all the clews again.
“An astonishing feature of the case is that none of the jewels contained in the safe has ever been recovered , despite a careful search of pawnshops all over the country.
Jerome built Rock Hall, Colebrook, Connecticut for Violet. The house was designed by Addison Mizner. It was the last house Mizner designed in the north before setting up for Palm Beach. The gardens were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead.
But Violet had influenza during the great epidemic of 1918, and according to her doctor suffered from “fits of melancholia” afterwards. She had a minor operation, and was visiting her mother-in-law at their estate, Nirvana. There, on May 10, 1919, she put a bullet through her head, leaving two children, Nathalie and Jerome Jr.
Jerome had been in the West Indies in 1912 and had met Helene G. Pile, the daughter of Orlando Jones. She was an amateur athlete from Sea Gate. After the death of Violet, Helene wrote him a letter of condolence. They resumed the acquaintanceship and married her at the appropriately named church of Our Lady of Solace in Sea Gate on December 11, 1919.
Jerome was a member of Squadron “A” of the New York troops. When trouble broke out on the Mexican border, he enlisted in the army and served as an aviator. During the First World War he was an instructor in an aviation camp in Texas.
After his military service Jerome moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and bought a ranch on Candelarias Road. But the Albuquerque papers reported that he “had a pleasing manner and had many friends” and an income of perhaps $1,000 a month ($10,000 in 2015 dollars).
He continued his driving exploits. He was picked up for drinking and was once found asleep in his car with the engine still running. On October 29, 1925 he swerved and hit a car driven by a Jesuit, the Rev. G. A. Whipple.
He had been separated from his wife Helene and their two children. She came to Albuquerque and they planned a post-Christmas reconciliation.
On Christmas 1925 Jerome Alexandre was found dead after a fire in a rooming house in Albuquerque. He has been drinking and smoking. He apparently fell asleep and dropped the cigarette on the mattress. It caught on fire. He jumped out of bed and tried to escape, but the door was barred, and he was suffocated. The funeral mass was held at Immaculate Conception Church and he was buried in Calvary Cemetery.
Helene stayed in Albuquerque for her health, and died in 1935. She left her minor son Jerome in the care of her daughter, who had married Martin Biddle.
In 1936 Jerome Alexandre, Jr., age 16, ran away with a friend from the Webb School in Claremont, California. He left a note that he was running away and instructed his sister to sell his car – a 16 year old who owned his own car during the Depression! His sister feared he had been abducted but he returned to Albuquerque and in 1938 did some damage to municipal property. He told police that “he was swinging on a ground wire…and caused an electric bulb to fall and break” but he was “ready to settle with the city.”
In May 1940 he was in Santa Barbara working at a filling station and studying photography. We was only twenty and had not yet received the $139,118 inheritance (about $1,000,000 in 2015 dollars) but the court allowed him $1,500, because he was already married with a child. In March 1942, having reached majority and received his inheritance, he had a private pilot’s license, had enlisted and flew with a friend from Albuquerque to San Antonio to get into the Air Corps. In June 1944 Lieutenant Alexandre reported for duty to Randolph Air Field in Texas.
He seems to have settled down and in 1954 moved to Farmington, New Mexico where he built a bottling works. But impulsiveness returned, and in April 1959 he shot himself in the head with a .22. The inquest ruled it was suicide.