50s Vintage Dame/Illustration Room
Near suppertime on a June evening in 1928, a man with a woman’s Spanish shawl draped over his broad shoulders held an ice pick aloft as he executed “a kind of an Indian war dance,” according to the police report, on the wet cobblestones of the Mississippi levee. Henry Smith “Harry” Turner III, scion of one of St. Louis’ founding families, was held for observation at City Hospital, but there were extenuating circumstances to show him sane. He was under considerable stress, out on bond after being charged, not for the first time, with obscenity, thanks to his gleeful publication of yet another shocking article in his magazine. He was also, one suspects, three sheets to the wind.
What does a city as staid as St. Louis do with a guy like Harry Turner?
Grandson of Anne Lucas Hunt (whose brother and husband were business partners of the explorer William Clark), Harry came squalling into the world amid the silks and velvets of the ancestral Lucas Hunt estate in Normandy. It was Christmas Day 1874.
He grew up dreamy, excited by poetry. His exasperated father sent him to a manual training school to hammer in some practicality, but Harry kept cutting class to jump on Engine 1076 of the Wabash Line and ride it out to St. Peters. He was going to be “a railroad man,” he informed his father, though the impulse did not last.
The fascination with engines did.
When Turner was not singing in a bar or brawling outside one, he was racing one of his newfangled “gasoline buggies.” In 1899, he bought a Stanley Steamer and later wrote (though this is impossible to prove) that it “was the first automobile the people of St. Louis or I had ever seen.” It attracted so much attention that he started an auto agency: “I wanted something to do, and this did not seem to be a legitimate business.” (Read that sentence carefully.) “It was perfectly marvelous how those things sold,” he continued. “Sober, solid business men would journey up to my little store on Twelfth Street and pay seven or eight hundred dollars for a toy that was not only useless but was positively dangerous. Truly, ‘men are but children of a larger growth.’”
Three years later, Turner, largest of them all, ordered a car that would be the fastest in St. Louis, capable of a full 47 mph. “An automobile is now being constructed in St. Louis that will outdistance any of its kind in the West,” the St. Louis Republic reported, adding that it was “of a handsome maroon color” and known only as “The Big Car.”
Any car, though, could intrigue him. Turner once borrowed a car he was garaging and took it for a prolonged spin with a pal. Police, out in full force to search for the stolen car, failed to see the fun of it. Turner was fined for “scorching in an automobile” (speeding) when, out again with the same pal, he “led the patrolman a merry chase for more than two hours,” the Republic reported. He was again arrested for scorching, this time on Euclid, and the police said he was going so fast (25 mph) that they could not catch him and had to arrest him the next day at his office.
Photography from the collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis
In 1911, Turner, now 37, had his first article published. It was titled “What Shall I Do?” and appeared under the pseudonym M. Evelyn Bradley, inspired by the woman he was about to wed, Martha Evelyn Lynch Bradley. She was as spirited a dilettante as he, and just 18 months after they married, he sued for divorce, saying he “regretted that the necessities of the occasion obliged him to charge his wife with possessing an ungovernable temper.” Seated on the balcony of his garage and smoking a cigar, Turner told a reporter, “I tried to make a good, wifely woman of Martha. It was too much even for a Nietzschean.”
By the time the divorce suit came to trial, the Turners had made up. Liking his taste of the literary life and “having learned so much that I now know nothing,” Turner next wrote a book, Autobiography of a Failure. In it he explained why the St. Louis Country Club had requested his departure, admitting that he had broken every one of the club’s rules save the one about not tipping the servants. Reviewers were delighted to see the elite satirized.
Blacklisted from St. Louis society, Turner started his own literary magazine, Much Ado, patterned after his friend William Marion Reedy’s Mirror. In one of his “Casual Moments,” Turner wrote how he’d love to see St. Louisans don the fashions of San Francisco in the Roaring ’40s or antebellum New Orleans. Another article considered what a gentleman should do when caught cheating at cards. In 1917, Turner chattily asked his readers whether he should divorce his Martha.
Furious, she now sued him for divorce, then reneged. Then Turner sued again, saying he “had to be free to think.” He also had to be free to enjoy the company of his magazine’s proofreader, the dancer Alice Martin. A Smith College graduate like Martha, she taught classics and loved the arts, starting a theater group and, most famously, creating the Hesitation Waltz, which she taught in Paris.
The unlikely combination of Turner’s pedigree and boyish candor charmed authorities as well as women. When he made a wrong turn and a patrolman pointed out the offense, Turner retaliated with a personal insult. The judge later asked the patrolman, “Why didn’t you hit him a wallop?” But the man had read Much Ado and liked that “it roasts society something awful.” When Turner accused a sales rep of wrongfully cashing a check made out to Much Ado, the case was dismissed, whereupon Turner struck the man in the face. The judge did not bat an eye. On another occasion, Turner stormed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s building with a pint of whiskey in his pocket; the charge was dismissed after a police officer testified that Turner had used no profanity. And when he was first charged with obscenity, because he mailed someone proofs of an article that he never published (and that accused a prominent St. Louis man of making advances to him), he was acquitted.
Turner was also indicted as a World War I spy because he wrote that the war was for “hypocrites, plutocrats, and degenerates,” but nothing came of that, either. When he was arrested on Thanksgiving Day 1921 for making counterfeit certificates for $1.5 million in French government bonds, his attorney tried to argue that it was “common knowledge” that the French republic was not repaying its wartime obligations, so certificates were not proper instruments of forgery. Another man, arrested with him, was convicted of the crime, but Turner was acquitted.
Five years later, his luck ran out when he was hit with another obscenity charge, this one for reprinting an article about Aimee Semple McPherson that he had called, tongue-in-cheek, “utterly filthy” and “unfit for publication.”
By now, Alice Martin, who had refused more than once to marry Turner, was his business manager. She was charged with obscenity alongside Turner, but the judge told her she need only apologize. She refused, saying that would be moral cowardice. She did not regret the publication of the article.
At trial, defense attorney J. Ray Weinbrenner read a passage from Shakespeare that was arguably more erotic, and he was starting on a selection from Rabelais when the judge dryly reminded him that moral standards were different in Europe.
The trial was still underway when a tornado demolished the Westminster Place house where Turner and Martin lived and worked. They moved to a warehouse district on the riverfront, helping found the Little Bohemia loft colony that would draw artists, writers, and musicians. From a café window, you could toss a drink into the Mississippi.
Turner eventually had to serve a short prison sentence, so Martin agreed to marry him, noting, “I am sure I could wangle more privileges out of whatever powers there be in the penitentiary if I were your wife than if I were merely—what shall I say?—your very good friend.” She sent him off with a new mattress, bed linens, and pillow; an ice chest; her phonograph; and some records.
Photography from the collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis
Turner’s 57th birthday was Christmas Day 1931. Worried about young families in the Depression, he gave money to several. Around 11:30 a.m., he climbed aboard the Erastus Wells, a harbor boat, and informed watchman Henderson Eshman that he was going swimming.
“I thought he was joking until he began taking off his clothes,” Eshman told the St. Louis Star and Times. Turner wore a bathing suit beneath his overcoat and trousers. As he adjusted a shoulder strap, he invited Eshman to join him, but Eshman said it was too cold.
His body washed ashore at Spruce Street, a gash or bruise on his head.
A poet friend recalled Turner’s saying that if one were to commit suicide, it would be more aesthetic to die at the hands of Old Man River than by a revolver. But Alice insisted that he would never have committed suicide.
Years later, she commissioned a bronze statue of St. Francis of Assisi in his honor. The formal, proper reason she gave St. Louis was that Turner “resembled St. Francis in his love for humanity and simple natural things.”
The likelier truth was the way she described Francis elsewhere, as “the gentle 13th-century monk who was everything Harry was not.”After she donated the statue to Forest Park, someone protested that its presence would violate the separation between church and state. A fracas ensued. Finally, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out that the entire city was named after a saint, and there was a statue of him in the park.
St. Francis was installed in front of the Jewel Box, a good place to pause for a moment’s reflection. So often, St. Louisans who live as…er…fully as Turner did wind up dying too soon, often inexplicably. The loss is ours. But it is hard to imagine them in rocking chairs.
