WINNIPEG FREE PRESS--April 26, 1954--By Kermit Jaediker
(GREENWICH VILLAGE)-- THEY found him with a bullet hole in his chest, while near him lay his wife with four knife wounds in her back. They lay in the stiff and contorted attitudes of violent death in a dirty furnished room loud with the occasional thunder of a passing El train which, when it passes, drowns all sound, including poetry. The windows faced Third Avenue, near 13th street, a few blocks walk from Bohemia, a million miles from it.
He had written:
"I shall walk down the road. I shall turn and feel upon my feet the kisses of Death, like scented rain . . ."
His last road was a walkup, five floors. When he was young, gin was an exhilarant. When he was young, in Bohemia, he could down a pint of it and hike up to the sky. But here in February, when he was 61, with five flights confronting him, gin was a heavy chain around his knees.
"For Death is a black slave with little silver birds perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head. He will tell me, his voice like jewels dropped into a silver bag, how he has tiptoed after me down the road."
But Death, for Maxwell Bodenheim, poet, last of the Bohemians, last of the garret geniuses of Greenwich Village, was not what he had pictured. Death was a gibbering ex-convict, claiming incoherently that he had performed a public good.
DETECTIVES learned the Bodenheims, down on their luck, had been living in the tiny, unheated room as guests of its occupant, former convict. Harold Weinberg, 26, vagabond dishwasher and expatient of a mental hospital. A widespread manhunt was launched for Weinberg. Detectives ranged through Greenwich Village and delve into Bodenheim's fantastic past. The investigators were told of "sadistic" friends of Bodenheim and of "weird" Village parties he had attended. They were told, too, of men who had detested him. Bodenheim had been a bitter man whose criticism of one young woman's poetry had driven her to suicide, and he had made many enemies as well as friends. But Weinberg emerged as the likeliest suspect of all.
THE DISHWASHER, when captured, and after a full day of alternately confessing and denying the murders, finally signed a written statement admitting he was the killer. It was learned that Weinberg had given two explanations for the murders. In one he made love to Mrs. Bodenheim while the poet slept in a gin-soaked stupor. Bodenheim awakened and furiously protested. Weinberg shot him dead, then knifed Mrs. Bodenheim to get rid of the only witness.
In the other Version, Weinberg said he shot Bodenheim because he was a Commie. Bodenheim was capable of soaring verse and immense stupidities, and one-of his stupidities was a crackpot espousal of Communism. The grinning, wild - eyed killer was led into court, and shouted that he should be given credit, rather than jail, for ridding the world of ''two Communist rats! " He sang a line from the Star-Spangled 'Banner while he saluted the flag behind the bench. Then he whirled and asked the packed courtroom, "Don't I look Sane?" He was ordered committed to Bellevue Hospital for mental observation.
MEANTIME, the poet was buried. That night the men who frequent the San Remo bar in Greenwich Village drank a toast in gin to the passing of Bodenheim. They drank, not only to the end of a poet, but the-end of. an era. This was the brawling, creative era of the 1920's. when Greenwich Village was truly Bohemia, and not the pallid ghost it is today. Bodenheim was a hand- some man with blonde hair, no formal education but a fine gift for imagery and an incurable zest for rebellion. In Chicago, where such poets as Carl Sandburg and Ezra Pound were working, Bodenheim pitched into a literary revolt that was sweeping America. He teamed up with Ben Hecht and founded the Chicago Times. Perhaps to show his contempt for the conventional, he sported a red beard. His first volume of verse, "Minna and Myself," came out. Its inspiration was his first wife, Minna Schein, whom he married in 1918. They were divorced later.
HE MOVED East, to the Village, where he was an instantaneous hit. He had all the requirements talent, an unwavering conviction that he was a genius, a good capacity for drink and a knack for producing money out of nowhere. The Village was famous for that. Finally, Bodenheim turned to novels. Sex always a sale- able topic, permeated his work. His "Replenishing Jessica," a study of the sex life of a young girl, was a sensation. John S. Sumner, then head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had Bodenheim and his publisher brought into court on the ground that the book was "filthy." However, they were acquitted. In all, Bodenheim wrote 13 novels, including "Naked on Roller Skates", and "Sixty Seconds." Some of them were best sellers. But he could never hold onto a buck. It just wouldn't become him, as a Bohemian.
HE WAS amiable and sometimes brutal. Two women committed suicide because of him. and a third at- tempted suicide. Virginia Drew, a 22-year-old beauty who wanted to be a poet and author, showed him some of her work, for he had become and arbiter in such matters. He told her callously that she was "wasting a lot of time on "sentimental slush" and advised her to give up writing. She said she "didn't want to live if I can't write." She was telling the truth. Next morning her body was fished out of the river. Gladys Loeb, 18-year-old daughter of a doctor, also aspired to become a poet. Bodenheim, her idol, told her she was writing trash. She sought death by the gas route, but police broke into her Village apartment and saved her. Clutched in her hand was a photograph of Bodenheim. Aimee Cortez, an artist's model known as the "Mayoress of Greenwich Village" was reportedly madly infatuated with Bodenheim. One day she was found dead in her gas-filled flat. Another girl. Dorothy Dear, was killed in a subway wreck while on her way to meet the poet. Among her effects were half a dozen love letters he had written her. Here is an excerpt:
"Did you ever walk on a cobweb stretched between the horns of a crescent moon? Or wrap yourself in flowered silence and deride the presence of lust?
"Or use a fantastic indifference to make horizons stand still. Or shield yourself with a smile from furtively vulgar men?"
If she could pass such tests, he said she should write him at once "and we may grow to like each other."
IN THE 1930's, Bodenheim began hitting the skids. His weakness for strong drink increased and he was finally diagnosed as alcoholic. Two years ago, seven men were arrested in a roundup of common vagrants sleeping on the subways. One of them was Maxwell Bodenheim. The tragedy was almost spun out. But there was still a greater depth for him to fall to. Only the day he died, detectives searching the murder room found a sign and a tin cup. "I am blind," the sign said, but Bodenheim was not blind, not until the bullet brought him darkness, the darkness of Death of whom he had written-
"He will graze me with his hands, and I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds between the cold waves of his hair, as he tiptoes on."
CHARLESTON GAZETTE--April 8, 1954
NEW YORK (INS)--Harold Weinberg, who killed Greenwich Village poet Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife in a shabby Bowery rooming house, was declared legally insane today. Two Bellevue Hospital psychiatrists reported that the 26-year-old vagrant was suffering schizophrenia (withdrawal from reality) with delusions of persecution.
He was ordered committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, at Beacon, N.Y. Weinberg shot Bodenheim and stabbed the poet's third wife, Ruth, to death last Sept. 7 in what apparently was a frenzied quarrel over the woman's attentions.
He had invited Ruth and Bodenheim--literary idol of Greenwich Village's "Little Bohemia" in the 1920s--to his furnished room, just off the Bowery, after he found them wandering homeless and destitute. Captured nearly a month later in a lower East Side basement, Weinberg ranted wildly that he deserved a medal for killing "two Communist rats" and denounced the judge at a preliminary hearing as a Red.
The confessed killer was admitted to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric treatment when he was six years old. Later he entered a state mental hospital, and after his release compiled a police record in various parts of the country.
(Images)
The Bodenheims: Buffalo Evening News, 08 February 1954, page 8.
Harold Weinberg: New York Daily News, 09 February 1954, page 3.