Strange Times 104: The Same Sorrowful Story

Strange Times is a newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. If you like it, forward it to a friend or back me on Patreon. And while you’re at it, why not grab yourself a copy of Westside, my 1921 mystery novel, or preorder the looming sequel, Westside Saints?

Today we have a single story of an ingenue accused of fraud most foul. Deny every allegation on…

April 14, 1921

• New York City police search private apartments for liquor, seizing 300 barrels of whiskey, 20,000 bottles of liquor, about 500 jugs and demijohns, four taxicabs and two touring cars.

• Jersey City’s Maud Augusta Haynes Andrews claims that her stock broker husband has brought a second wife home to live with them, without divorcing her or kicking her out.

• Caruso celebrates his continued recovery by humming for the first time since December and making plans for what operas he will sing in the fall.

• The Weather: Cloudy today, followed by rain tonight or Friday; no change in temperature; east and southeast winds.

This may be the best heel turn in the history of this newsletter. Dorothy Miller, who won the nation’s attention for offering to mary “any white man” in the country in exchange for $1,000 to save her mother’s life, who was spared that fate by being given a $1,000 one-week contract to appear on Broadway, has been accused of being a fraud.

I am genuinely shocked by this—and far more impressed with Miss Miller—as well as being embarrassed for forgetting that, “My ma needs an operation,” was an old lie even in 1921.

Dorothy Miller, who said she would marry any white man for $1,000 to pay for an operation to have her mother’s life, and who got the $1,000 to appear on Broadway one week, denied last night that her family is the same one which is registered with charitable organizations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as in other cities, as having appealed for money to pay for “operations” for the last ten years.

She is now appearing with the Winter Garden company, in which she sings a little song. When she first went on earlier in the week she received much applause, and Tuesday night she had three curtain calls, but last night, after the publication of a story that her family had written letters to many prominent persons and to newspapers in the last year, telling the same sorrowful story, she did not get the same handclap. Her engagement will end Saturday night.

“We accepted her story in good faith and gave her a contract to appear in good faith,” said a representative of the Shuberts yesterday. “We have no reason to believe that her story is not true, and we will keep her on until the end of the week, as we intended.”

Miss Miller is a most self-possessed young woman. She discussed the stories which have been printed with composure, and seems fully as nonchalant in the wings of a theatre as any chorus girl who has danced through half a dozen seasons. The first night she went on some one asked her if she were nervous.

“No; should I be?” she asked.

A woman connected with a charitable organization said yesterday that she was certain the Miller family was the same Miller family which for several years in Brooklyn asked for aid in a similarly spectacular way. This Miller family wrote a letter to a Brooklyn newspaper and asked for help, and the letter was forwarded to the charitable organization. Later other letters came to the same organization, which had been forwarded for investigation by wealthy men and women to whom they had been written. The organization found out that Mrs. Miller had a husband in perfect health, who seemed to be constitutionally unable to get work. Later the family went to Baltimore and then to Trenton, N.J.

Miss Miller denied last night that her family had ever lived in Baltimore, and was emphatic in saying that they had never applied to any Trenton people for help. She said that neither she nor her mother had ever written letters asking for help before the one in which she offered to marry any man for $1,000.

“My mother is not going to have the operation until she gets stronger,” she said, and added that her father was going to work pretty soon.

Marie Dressler hummed a little song last night off stage which went:

It’s spring and I’m full of syncopation,

‘Cause I got a thousand dollars for my mother’s operation.