Chapter 6: Winsor French II

Silver Spoons and Silver Clouds

Winsor French II
1904-1973

Downtown Cleveland’s jazz clubs teemed with late-night revelers, when pianist Dick Mone headlined entertainment bills in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Occasionally accompanied by a female singer, his smooth, soothing sets attracted a devoted fan base wherever he played from nine at night until two in the morning. His most faithful followers: The city’s gays and lesbians, who kept their social calendars flexible to catch Mone’s act at any minute. And their eyes were peeled for his schedule in Winsor French’s society columns in the "Cleveland Press." “I remember (Dick) changed from one bar to another,” groupie Leonard Delores recalled. “He had a gay following but it was a very subtle thing. And Winsor wrote up, ‘Well, the younger-than-springtime set was following Dick Mone.’”

A revered gossip reporter, Winsor commanded the written word, and his LGBT readers devoured every one of his columns. To describe Mone’s fan base, Winsor borrowed a line from a Rodgers & Hammerstein song in the 1949 Broadway hit, "South Pacific." “Younger than springtime are you/Gayer than laughter are you,” went the lyrics to “Younger Than Springtime,” in which an infatuated Lieutenant Joe Cable croons to the shy island girl, Liat. Most of the newspaper’s straight subscribers were clueless about the “younger-than-springtime” cryptogram; many of its gay and lesbian readers caught on to Winsor’s code phrase. However, unlike his enigmatic play on words, both his life and career were no mysteries.

Winsor Brown French II was born into a prosperous and prestigious family in Saratoga Springs, New York, on December 24, 1904, the third of four children to Winsor P. and Edith G. French. His Vermont-born, law school-educated grandfather, after whom he was named, enlisted in the U.S. Army on September 24, 1861, and served for the Union as a Civil War colonel of New York’s 77th regiment. He ultimately was promoted to brigadier general of American volunteer troops a month before the war ended on April 9, 1865.

After General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate troops at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, the elder Winsor returned to his Saratoga Springs home to partner with a couple of fellow attorneys to establish the Ponds, French & Brackett law firm in the city’s town hall. Saratoga County voters then elected him their district attorney for a one-year term in 1868. He also fathered three children: Emma in 1870, Georgina in 1873 and Winsor P. in 1875. And he later served as a New York delegate at the 1896 Republican National Convention to nominate Niles native William McKinley for president.

In his spare time, Winsor held a seat on the executive committee of the Saratoga Humane Society. And from February of 1899 to June of 1903, he held the position of postmaster-general of the Saratoga Springs Post Office. He spent his final years on a farm he purchased in the neighboring rural village of Wilton, where he died on March 24, 1910, at the age of 77.

Winsor’s only son followed in his footsteps. Winsor P. served in the 201st Infantry during the Spanish-American War before returning home to marry Edith in 1899. They settled into a home near his dad’s law firm, and he founded his own legal practice in town.

Winsor and Edith eventually started a family with the birth of their first of two daughters, Edith, in 1901. They then welcomed into the fold Caroline “Carol” Winsor in 1902, Winsor Brown II in 1904 and Edward in 1908. Between the births of their two sons, Edith tried her hand at acting on the Broadway stage in the spring of 1905. She first appeared in Augustus Thomas’ "The Education of Mr. Pipp" at the Liberty Theatre on West 42nd street, then Paul Armstrong’s "The Heir to the Hoorah" at the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street. But tragedy loomed on the horizon.

To say the least, the 32-year-old’s Winsor P.’s sudden death in 1908 rocked the family’s foundation. Edith packed up her children and belongings and moved to neighboring Rensselaer County on the New York-Massachusetts border. In the county seat of Troy, the family lived in a row house at 44 Second St. next to a white-marble, Federal-style house built in 1827 by one of New York City’s leading bankers, William Howard, for his only daughter, Betsey, and her husband, Richard P. Hart, who was president of Troy Savings Bank. By the time Edith and her kids moved in, their next-door neighbor was Mary A. Cluett, the 51-year-old widow of George B. Cluett, who helped found Cluett, Peabody and Company, a manufacturer of shirts and collars. The business helped give Troy its nickname, “the Collar City.”

Edith kept her home running smoothly by hiring Irish-born Agnes Walsh as the family’s live-in cook; Agnes’ daughter, Nora, as their maid; and local nurse Mary Henry as the children’s nanny. But in 1910, she married 37-year-old Joseph Oriel Eaton II and moved her family to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where her new husband co-owned a company that manufactured patented truck axles. The couple quickly added to Ethel’s brood from her first marriage with the births of Joseph Jr. in 1911 and Margaret in 1914.

Joseph’s firm relocated to a plant at 1115 E. 152nd Street in Cleveland in 1917 to be closer to its primary clients in the automotive industry. But after a succession of buyouts by the business’ own customers, Eaton bowed out of the corporation the following year and started his own axle-manufacturing company at 10017 Euclid Ave.

The decision ultimately proved profitable. Eaton’s business philosophy centered on buying other companies within the automobile sector to make his empire grow at its East Side headquarters. One acquisition after another led to his enterprise going global in 1937, when he built a manufacturing plant in Canada. But his death in 1949 would prevent him from witnessing his company’s impressive performance in 2008, when the Eaton Corporation ranked 154th on the Fortune 500 list with sales topping $15.4 billion in 150 countries. “You couldn’t have worked for a better man,” one of his former workers said after Joseph was posthumously inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1983.

The Eaton family’s ballooning fortune allowed for luxurious trappings, such as private tutors and maids in their spacious first home at 2193 Harcourt Dr. north of Rockefeller Park in Cleveland Heights. Edith also gave birth to the couple’s two youngest children, Martha in 1918 and Anne in 1919, the same year the family moved to an even larger home at 2207 Devonshire Rd. north of Cedar Road.

As the elder stepson, Winsor wasn’t shy at taking advantage of the Eaton wealth throughout the roaring ‘20s. While he failed miserably in classes at both Kenyon College in Gambier and at his stepfather’s alma mater, Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he adored frequent Atlantic Ocean voyages aboard the RMS Aquitania and the SS Mauritania to the port of Cherbourg, France, to hobnob with the continental elite. He also discovered his passion for writing about his international travels on postcards to his family and friends in the States.

Once he was back in Cleveland, Winsor jumped on his newfound talent to team with 25-year-old buddy and polo-playing fanatic W. Holden White to publish the first issue of "Parade" on June 11, 1931. The weekly magazine spotlighted “social, semi-humorous and pictorial” sketches of Cleveland’s people, places and events. Sporadically placed within the pages was a series of boxed questions, like “Who is the minister who has the most complete collection of pornography in the city?” The unanswered queries added to the magazine’s allure.

Winsor’s debut article, “The Melancholy Tale of Moser’s,“ recanted the story of the defunct Cheese Club, whose members had met every Friday night since 1896 for beer, cheese and debate at Otto Moser’s sandwich bar on East Fourth Street. The gatherings folded at the dawn of Prohibition in 1929. “Whisky was forbidden; it wrecked conversation and started fights,” Winsor reported about the group’s heyday. “The meetings were almost always exclusively male as the conversation was considered a bit too risqué for the ladies of the drama.”

With Jerome Brainerd Zerbe Jr. as its chief photographer and art director, the periodical scored praise from "Time" magazine, whose reviewer wrote that the premier issue “easily equaled 'Town & Country.'” The critic also mentioned that Cleveland was a “scene of such dithering excitement” that a bunch of amateur journalists could churn out a high-quality rag. However, "Parade" ceased publication in 1933 because of mounting production costs in the midst of the Great Depression. Nevertheless, Winsor had established himself as a formidable society reporter. His reputation was not lost on the "Cleveland Press," whose editors immediately hired him to cover the city’s entertainment beat.

But Winsor carved out more ambitious plans for both the newspaper and himself. He offered to traipse around the world at his expense and dispatch stories to the newsroom about all the beautiful people with whom he socialized. The assignments frequently took him to London, Paris and Venice. He made regular treks to New York City to immerse himself in its theatrical world. He also chummed around with his collection of gay comrades, including Cleveland philanthropist Leonard Hanna, composer Cole Porter and actor Monty Woolley, all of whom he met at the parties he chronicled in his society column.

But like most gay men of his generation, Winsor concealed his sexual orientation by asking a woman to marry him. His choice of bride: The ravishing 20-year-old actress Margaret Hall Frueauff, who was billed on the New York stage as Margaret Perry. The elder of two daughters of the late Denver utilities magnate Frank A. Frueauff and respected Broadway director Antoinette Perry (after whom the theater world’s most treasured award, the Tony, would be named), Margaret extravagantly lived on her inherited wealth. She enjoyed a $2,225 monthly allowance from her trust fund. And when she turned 21 on February 23, 1934, she was eligible to cash in on the $675,259.93 that her father bequeathed to her in his will before his death in 1922.

Winsor and Margaret married in a lavish Big Apple wedding ceremony on October 7, 1933. The extravaganza made front-page headlines in all of Cleveland’s newspapers. And no expense was spared after a surrogate judge approved an $18,851 advance from Margaret’s inheritance. The wedding bills included $7,480 for her trousseau, $1,850 for flowers and decorations, $1,606 for refreshments, $1,500 for a chauffeur-driven limousine and $1,000 for the couple’s honeymoon, which they wouldn’t take until a year later.

The newly betrothed Frenches made their home in a suite of rooms at the Eatons’ Devonshire Drive estate. With Margaret’s resume loaded with glowing reviews as the leading lady in her mother’s Broadway production of "Strictly Dishonorable," she landed a plum role in an extended-run presentation of "Criminal at Large" at the Cleveland Play House.

Winsor, meanwhile, continued to work the society beat for the "Press." For most of 1934, he stayed close to home, unearthing pockets of Cleveland that usually didn’t garner much publicity. For example, his August 25 column trumpeted a clambake in the newly revitalized “Little Hollywood” neighborhood on Hough Avenue between East 71st and East 97th streets. In his report, he described a row of “little shops that have stood empty for years are blossoming forth with new coats of paint and fancy names.” There was the Midnite Frolic, a nightclub in which patrons couldn’t enter unless they produced 25-cent membership cards to the doorman. At the Ritz Grill, fair-haired waitresses with “pleasantly insinuating eyes” politely took orders while diners often broke into song and dance at their tables. “It is a gay, colorful jumble,” Winsor wrote. “The bands start tuning up as soon as it grows dark and continue until long after dawn. And the aimless crowd wandering from door to door looks more like the nightly parade of Paris’ Montmartre than anything Cleveland has seen in a long, long time.”

But the French marriage started to unravel as soon as the “I do’s” were spoken. Ostensibly, Winsor’s homosexuality exacerbated the union’s quick disintegration. On vacation in Europe to celebrate their first anniversary, the couple agreed to part ways. In early December of 1934, Margaret flew to Reno for a quickie divorce, citing “mental cruelty” for the marital breakdown. She would later marry actor Burgess Meredith, then motion-picture art director Paul Fanning, with whom she had two sons and two daughters. She subsequently retired from acting and died on April 8, 2007, at the age of 94 on her family’s Salt Works Ranch in South Park, Colorado, west of Colorado Springs.

Winsor sought consolation from gay friends for his failed marriage. He and his longtime confidant, Leonard Hanna, eventually became lovers in a relationship that would last until Leonard’s death in 1957. The relationship was well-known in their social circles. During a party at gay actor Clifton Webb’s home in Beverly Hills, "Gone With the Wind" screenwriter Sidney Howard asked Leonard, “Whatever became of that dreadful fairy who married Margaret Perry?” Winsor overhead the question and asked Howard to repeat it. Indignantly, he told the Oscar winner, “I am that dreadful fairy,” to which Howard sniffed, “Well, whatever became of you?”

The truth was that Winsor had become a household name in Cleveland. His newspaper columns about his international travels were must-reads for subscribers. Accounts of New York parties with movie stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead and Clark Gable riveted readers. And Cole Porter remained a frequent subject of his columns throughout most of Winsor’s career. “In every way, Porter was probably the most brilliant, gifted and witty music maker of our time,” he wrote in a February 3, 1965, tribute that was published four months after the songwriter’s death. “He knew exactly what he was doing and what effects he hoped to achieve. Almost always, his compositions were tailor-made for singers whose voices he knew and appreciated.”

Winsor’s voyages to and from Europe aboard steamliners like the "Queen Elizabeth," the "Santa Paula" and the "Ile de France" also gave his fans a taste of the charmed life of café society. But his traveling tips often made the average Joe’s eyebrows arch. “To charter a yacht is not nearly as fracturing as you’d think,” he wrote. “They come from $250 a day on up.”

Winsor even made slice-of-life descriptions of road trips from New England to New York City seem thrilling. Take the time in the fall of 1952, when he drove from his beloved Williamstown to midtown Manhattan. “(There are) the jaywalkers who dart from behind parked trucks, the shouting taxi drivers, and the harried pedestrians looking as if they were late for their psychiatrists,” he wrote. “The entire scene is rather like a macabre Agnes de Mille ballet and a very strange contrast to the serenity of New England I had just left.”

Winsor turned heads in the summer of 1962, when he became the only working journalist in Cleveland wealthy enough to buy a Rolls-Royce. But the purchase of the sleek Silver Cloud model didn’t come without its headaches. On the day he had it imported it from England, the International Longshoremen’s Association refused to unload it from the boat in New York Harbor because its members had gone on strike. The car was then shipped back to Southhampton and left aboard the ocean liner until the next voyage across the Atlantic.

With outstretched arms, Winsor watched the ship sail into New York Harbor aa second time, only to learn that the union hadn’t resolved its labor dispute. So the Silver Cloud again went back to England. After a third trip to New York once the strike ended, he finally claimed his coveted set of wheels. But his troubles were far from over. “It was bad enough that the Rolls had been trapped in the hold of an ocean ship for so long,” "Plain Dealer" columnist George E. Condon wrote in March of 1980. “But it was a real crusher when French learned that it had been necessary to fumigate his glistening Rolls to rid the car of the boll weevils, stray tarantulas and whatever other vermin may be found in the cargo hold.”

Soon after Winsor drove the car to Cleveland, a crippling disease started to make it difficult for him to walk. At 58, he hired a chauffeur named Sam to drive him around town, including to his office at the "Press." Imagine the looks on co-workers’ faces during their own four-month-long strike in the spring of 1963, when Sam -- with his employer in the back seat -- drove into the newspaper’s parking lot so Winsor could pick up his mail. At the same time, editor Louis B. Seltzer was exiting the lot in his ho-hum Ford. The picketers cheered their fellow union brother as the boss swung out of the lot.

Winsor’s subsequent use of a wheelchair armed with a bicycle bell prompted him to lobby Mayor Ralph Locher, who ordered City Council to make all of Cleveland’s public buildings handicapped-accessible. Lyndon Johnson consequently awarded Winsor a presidential citation in 1966 for his work on behalf of the disabled.

But the inevitable came a couple of years later. Unable to comfortably roll his wheelchair around the newsroom, the 64-year-old Winsor retired from a career that gave him carte-blanche access to the rich and famous. For the rest of his days, he lived as a recluse in his apartment at 13900 Shaker Blvd. among his rare books, priceless antiques and autographed snapshots of celebrity friends.

On Tuesday, March 6, 1973, Winsor died in the bed to which he had been confined for months. An afternoon memorial service was held a couple of days later at St. Paul Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights. In his will, he asked to be buried in his stepfather’s family plot in the Berkshires of extreme Northwestern Massachusetts. His death triggered a series of published homages from colleagues for years to come. “Whatever grievances his column expressed inclined toward deploring the wine list at a fancy restaurant in Paris or maybe the fading elegance of St. Tropez, not the kind of issues likely to bring the ordinary taxpayer into the street bearing banners of protest,” "Press" columnist Bob August opined in the Sept. 18, 1979, issue.

In the newspaper’s final edition on June 17, 1982, Dick Feagler recapped part of his own journalism career with a couple of paragraphs devoted to Winsor, who often infuriated co-worker Bill Rice for stories about his overseas jaunts. The feature writer would scream, “Goddammit, French. Everybody isn’t in Europe! I’m not in Europe!” Feagler’s column also brought up the fabled Silver Cloud that had caused Winsor so much trouble after he bought it. “When French died, we heard Sam got the Rolls,” he wrote. “We didn’t check it because we wanted it to be true. Memories are what you want them to be.”

Winsor’s name lived on more than two decades after his death, when, on July 8, 1995, the Wyndham Cleveland Play House Square Hotel on Euclid Avenue unveiled its new restaurant, Winsor’s. Fittingly, the writer’s own 1920s-style caricatures of movie stars, stage actors and musicians lined the walls. And the menu depicted fine, upscale cuisine like rack of lamb, turkey medallions and bacon-wrapped tenderloin that Winsor savored in his worldly travels. Fayette Hickox -- the son of Winsor’s half-sister, Martha -- paid tribute to his uncle to news reporters after the restaurant’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. “His byline was as likely to come from Paris as from Cleveland,” he said. “He told his editor he was going to do updates on life in Europe. But rather than write about the Marshall Plan and people living on rations, he would report on what Noel Coward said last night at dinner. He was one of the bright, young things of Cleveland.”

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Winsor French was buried in Section C, Plot 836 of the Eaton Family Lot at Westlawn Cemetery on Sabin Drive off Cold Spring Road in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He was 68 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser