There
are a great many newspaper articles on the remarkable exploits of Fayne Moore.
Here are but two.
FULL
TEXT (Article 1 of 2): When the case of William E. A. Moore and Fayne Moore was
called in a New York court Tuesday, Mrs. Moore’s entrance created a sensation.
They are accused of working the “badger game” on Martin Marion.
Mrs.
Moore’s beauty struck everybody in that crowded court room as she walked to the
rail. There was a buzz of admiration from the 150 talesmen [the jury pool] and the throng of
spectators in the rear of the court room. Recorder Goff looked interested, and
the lawyers turned to discover the cause of the stir.
Mrs.
Moore was perfectly composed. She might easily have been the most unconcerned
person in the court room.
She
was handsomely, even gorgeously dressed. She wore a dark green skirt, trimmed
with heavy black braid. Her waist was of a light red silk. She wore a watch,
crusted with jewels, on her bosom, and on her fingers sparkled several,
magnificent rings. In her ears were large diamonds.
Mrs.
Moore’s picture hat was a wonderful creation. A dozen large black ostrich
plumes of the most expensive sort trembled upon it and had shaded her face on
one side. Mrs. Moore wore this wonderful hat tilted a little over left ear.
Mrs.
Moore bowed to Recorder Goff, with a little smile, shook hands with Mr. Levy
and then looked calmly about her. Every pair of eyes in the big court room was
turned upon her, but this did not seem either to surprise or disconcert her.
Her expression was one of amused interest, as though the proceedings did not
concern her personally in the slightest.
She
took a seat beside lawyer Levy. On her left was her husband. She bowed to him
in a matter-of-fact way.
And
then was noticed a remarkable peculiarity of this most remarkable prisoner.
Asst.
Dist. Atty Daniel O’Reilly stood in front of the counsel’s table and next to
Mr. McIntyre. Mrs. Moore turned her wonderful blue eyes on Mr. O’Reilly and he
blushed like a schoolboy. A moment later she caught the eye of Register Isaac
Fromme, who happened to be in the court. Mr. Fromme is not easily discomfited,
but he could not withstand that gaze. He blushed, too, then turned and walked
into a far-off corner.
Others
who mot the calm gaze of those bewildering orbs of deepest blue shared a like fate.
Nobody
cared what transpired in the court room. Every eye was upon the beautiful
prisoner.
During
all this time not a word had been spoken. The silence was becoming oppressive.
“I
must insist that this woman leave the court room,” said Mr. McIntyre,
addressing Recorder Goff. “I have my reasons.”
Mrs.
Moore looked displeased. She frowned at Mr. McIntyre. Then she smiled at Col.
Gardiner. She smiled at the judge and leaned back once more.
Finally
Mr. McIntyre consented to Mrs. Moore remaining in the court room. He insisted,
however, that she be placed in a far-off corner, inside the judge’s railing.
This was done.
Mrs.
Moore arose from her seat. She bowed to a court officer who approached her, and
then followed him inside the inclosure and sat down in the far corner of the
court room, from where she cannot see the witness chair nor the jury box.
After
the session was concluded Asst Dist Ally McIntyre made the following statement
to a reporter:
“I
believe that there is such a thing as hypnotism. During my experience as an
assistant, district attorney I have come across many such cases. This has every
indication of being a genuine instance.
“Mrs.
Johnson, with whom Mrs. Moore boarded in this city, has assured us that she is
capable of hypnotizing al most any man. Her eyes are wonderful. Had I allowed
her to sit before the jury there is no telling what would happen.
“I am
hypnotism proof, I knew what Mr. Levy was after when he tried to have Mrs.
Moore remain at his side during the trial.
“I am
certain of the conviction of the defendant Moore, and the trial of Mrs. Moore
will promptly follow. They have no place in thin community.”
[“Mrs.
Moore’s Eyes Dazzle A Court. - Assistant District Attorney
McIntyre Compels Her Retirement from Jury’s View.” The Boston Daily Globe
(Ma.), Dec. 1, 1898, p. 9]
***
FULL
TEXT: Almost every year of her life, one of the richest women in the world used
to travel 2000 miles to eat Christmas dinner with her old mother in America The
war changed the schedule of these pilgrimages. The latest visit came this summer.
The
rich woman began these pilgrimages soon after the time, 20 years ago, when she
stepped from the stage of the London Gaiety Theatre and into the arms of the
Diamond King of Kimberley. For eleven months in the year she divides her time
between her palatial London home, her English country estate, Tans and the
Riviera, but for one month she packs her trunks, crosses the Atlantic and
journeys far into the sunny South
just
so she can sit down in a small, one story cottage and care the Christmas turkey
for a white-haired old lady who calls her “my little girl, Pet.”
~ A
Strange Life Drama ~
The
life story of this woman reads like fiction. The “toast of the town” in a big
southern city; a principal in a “badger” game in which a New York millionaire
was the victim, the wife of a convict sentenced to 20 years in Sing Sing, the
sensation of Parisian boulevards because she threw a bottle at a marquis; a
London chorus girl; the bride of the Diamond King these might form the titles
to lurid chapters in her career. The South knew her as “the sweetest girl in
Dixie.” New York called her “the beautiful blackmailer.” In London and Paris
she was a stage favorite with a reputation for temper as well as for looks. She
is chiefly famous today for the $300,000 rope of pearls she wears in London
drawing-rooms. But to the little old lady, her mother, she will always be just
“Pet.” Mrs. Fayne Strahan Moore Lewis to give “Pet” her full name is the
daughter of the late fudge Reuben Scott Strahan, who was chief justice of the
state of Oregon when “Pet” was born there 35 years ago. Her mother was Sara
Wilson, a daughter of the famous Kentucky Wilsons, the bluest blood of the Blue
Grass.
~That
“Fatal Gift”~
Almost
from infancy “Pet” was beautiful.
“When
she was a little girl,” says her mother, “her hair fell below her knees in a
thick rope of gold. It was the richest, finest hair I’ve ever seen, and her
eyes were a peculiar greenish blue. She had beautiful white teeth and everyone
agreed her figure was perfect.”
“Pet”
still retains that beauty today, for, according to her mother, she has always
taken the most scrupulous care of her looks, dieting when she threatens to
become fat, so that she never allows herself to weigh more than 115 pounds. But
it was her beauty, too a ruinous beauty that “Pet” sorrow and as well as fame
and riches.
She
was living in the city of where her mother moved because of her health after
Judge Strahan’s death, when she first felt the lure of the footlights. Already
she was the most beautiful girl in a city of beautiful girls. Staid citizens
who today are judges of courts and in the business world of Atlanta used to sit
for hours on the Strahan porch, playing their banjos and for the benefit of
little “Pet.” She danced in Atlanta’s Kirmess so gracefully that, says her
mother, in a week she had three proposals. And she was only 18.
When
she was 20 “Pet” went to New York to study art. That was in the early There she
met and married William A. F. Moore, a relative of the wife of the late Senator
Mark Hanna. Then came the episode that stirred the country as no criminal case
has since, with the possible exception of the Thaw trial. Mr. and Mrs. Moore
were arrested on a charge of attempting to blackmail Martin Mahon, a New York
millionaire, out of $50,000. The old “badger game” was said to be the means
they used. The trial was the sensation of the decade.
According to the testimony, “Pet” was ordered by her husband
to undress to her chemise in the hotel room they occupied and to telephone
downstairs for Martin Mahon, who owned what was then one of New York’s most
palatial hostelries.
Mahon,
even then an old man, entered his room and closed the door behind him. Almost before
he had time to say anything, a double rap sounded at the door. The woman
motioned to him to creep under the bed and Mahon. Bewildered and frightened,
did so. Enter then William Moore, who called to him to come out, threatened to
shoot them both, and finally, Mahon testified, agreed to “keep quiet” if the
old man gave him a check for $50,000.
Mahon
signed the check then and there, but it was never cashed. Two minutes after he
had left the room the pair were arrested.
Moore
was sentenced to 20 years in Sing Sing prison, but “Pet” went free. The
evidence was strong against her. but her old friends from Atlanta fought hard
in her behalf. A young Atlanta lawyer, one of her suitors, now a supreme court
judge, traveled to New York to defend her gratis. The jury was so moved by her
beauty that one juryman, interviewed after she was acquitted, declared that no
judge or jury in the world would believe anything ill of such a wide-eyed innocent
looking girl.
~ Her
Career in London ~
The
world next heard of “Pet” abroad, when her portrait appeared in some of the
sensational newspapers of the day, under such captions as this:
“This
lady will be remembered as the wife of the gentleman who is at present
lingering in Sing Sing for having attempted, with the assistance of his wife,
to ‘badger’ the late Martin Mahon out of $50,000. For some reason the
subsequent case against Fayne was not pressed, and she is at present in Paris,
where she recently proved herself, in a cafe, a perfect lady by hurling a
bottle at a marquis who, she considered, was staring at her too strenuously.
Then she repented and asked the waiter to introduce the marquis, and all went
merry as a marriage bell – a simile which should not be taken too literally.
Fayne Moore and Florence Crosby, also in Paris and ‘very popular,’ according to
the cable dispatcher, have met and taken a great liking for each other, each of
them no doubt acting as a restraint upon her companion, in case of excess of
exuberance. Shortly after the Martin Mahon affair Fayne was engaged to appear
at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in
‘Round New York in Eighty Minutes,’ but changed her mind at the last of
the eighty minutes and moved to Europe. Oh, woman, in our hours of ease!”
Another
paper hail the following item: “Fayne Moore, the woman who once upon a time
declared that she would stay in New York and tight as long as she lived for the
pardon of her husband. William A E. Moore, who is serving a sentence of 20 years
in Sing Sing prison for attempting to ‘badger’ Martin Mahon out of $50,000. But
the charming Fayne was altogether too young and vivacious to enact for any
considerable length of time the role of a martyr. She prefers a livelier type
and, according to report, is playing a small part under an assumed name in ‘The
Messenger Boy,’ now running at the Gaiety Theatre in London. It is whispered
also that she will soon marry again.”
~
Again a Bride ~
That
“whisper” came true, for in less than three weeks after he had secured her part
at the Gaiety, “Pet” Strahan, divorced from her convict-husband had become the
bride of Henry D Lewis, son of Isaac Lewis, who, with the late Barney Barnato,
is reputed to own the biggest diamond mines in the world, the famous Kimberley
and De Beers mines in South Africa
The wedding was an international sensation, but in marrying
a millionaire while she was a chorus girl, “Pet” Strahan only ran true to form,
for the Gaiety girls have ever been famous for just such alliances. From this
theatre such famous actresses as Edna May, Fanny Ward, Madge Leasing and Helen
Ward all went into homes of xx wealth, the brides of rich Englishmen.
Of
them all, however, none got a richer prize than did “Pet” Strahan Moore and
Fanny Ward, for they married into the same family and some idea of its wealth
may be gained when it is stated that the Barnate Lewis interests paid more than
$100,000,000 in war tax alone to the British empire.
Fanny
Ward married an uncle of “Pet’s” husband, a brother of Isaac Lewis. And the
strange part of the story is that Fanny Ward’s daughter Dorothy, at the age of
17, married Barney Barnato’s son. Capt. Isaac Barnato, an officer of the Royal
Air Force who served with distinction in the Dardanelles.
~
Romance at the London Home ~
The
two met in the London home of “Pet” Lewis, and it was she who engineered the
marriage, which was performed secretly at her home.
But,
like her own first marriage, it was doomed to tragedy Young Barnato died after
he and his girl bride had had only one Christmas together, leaving Dorothy
grief-stricken but with some consolation in the two millions to which she fell
heir.
It is
a notable fact that the biggest things in the lives of these two famous women,
Fanny Ward and “Pet” Lewis, is the love of the one for her daughter, and of the other for her
mother. Almost the same time that Fanny
Ward was crossing the ocean to England to console her little girl over the
death of her husband and to see to the settlement of the estate, “Pet” Lewis
was crossing the ocean in the opposite direction to visit her old mother.
The
two had been separated for four years because of the war four years when “Pet”
was not able to come home for that annual Christmas feast in the little
vine-covered cottage.
But
the last thing she said as she left her mother in Atlanta to return to England
after a visit of ten days this summer was: “I will be back to eat Christmas
turkey with you.”
[Ward
Greene, “Why Beautiful Fayne Moore Comes Back America - The Extraordinary Life
of the Principal Figure in a Notorious “Badger Game” Trial, Now Married to the
“Diamond King, “ and Who Once Again Has Crossed the Sea to Visit Her Aged
Mother in Atlanta.” Syndicated (Newspaper Feature Service), Aug. 9, 1919,
magazine section]
***
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