Widow's Wigwam

When a man, 73, marries a woman, 23, the press is interested. When, in 1914, the man happened to be scandalously rich old-time Tammany Boss Richard Wellstead Croker the press was convulsed with excitement. In 1901 Tammany had been soundly beaten by Fusion Candidate Seth Low. Boss Croker had gone back to his native Ireland to buy a huge estate in County Dublin with the proceeds of years of "honest Tammany graft." He then launched on a racing career, which reached its peak when bluff Edward VII refused to ask him to a Derby dinner when Croker's horse Orby won the 1907 Derby.

In 1914 he returned to New York to bury his wife, met a charming girl who called herself, somewhat interchangeably, Beula Benton Edmondson (her father was a Scotsman descended from a Norman knight who crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror), or Keetaw Kelantucky Sequoan (her mother was a Cherokee descended from Chief Sequoyah who invented the Cherokee alphabet). After a month's courtship he married her. Despite elaborate precautions to keep the time and place of the wedding secret, enthusiastic Tammany crowds jammed the streets for blocks. Dozens of New York's photographers turned out. To avoid their curiosity, Boss Croker and his bride decided at the last minute to get married not in church but in a friend's house.

Nevertheless the 23-year-old Mrs. Croker had faced photographers before. Once she had ridden bareback round the stage of the Hippodrome singing Indian love songs. Promptly she issued a mimeographed statement to the press: "It is the ambition of every Indian girl to win a Chief, and I have won the Chief of Men."

Chief Croker took his wife to Florida for their honeymoon. Years earlier he had bought two miles of Palm Beach waterfront, built the first house in Palm Beach, an immensity named the Wigwam, out of compliment to his Tammany antecedents. As he grew older and more feeble, the Crokers left Palm Beach, spent most of their time in County Dublin. In 1922. while the children of his first marriage were trying desperately to have him declared mentally unfit. ex-Boss Croker died.

All of his property went to his wife. Suits to break the will were begun in Ireland, in Florida, in New York. Mrs. Croker soon developed a passion for litigation, before long was involved in an incredibly complicated tangle of lawsuits. Under the hands of lawyers the vast estate--during Florida boom years the waterfront property was valued at $10,000,000--withered. Pressed for cash, she mortgaged the prodigious Wigwam as well as her Irish castle.

Millionaire Palm Beachers Edward T. Stotesbury, Barclay H. -Warburton, Joseph E. Wldener, never on good terms with Neighbor Beula Croker, protested loudly when she tried to raise money by subdividing her property and selling it in lots. In 1932 she worked hard for Roosevelt's election, for a time was county relief chairman, ran with no success for Congress. But all such activities were strictly extracurricular. For 15 years Mrs. Croker's life was spent almost entirely in court. She sued her agents, her attorneys, her creditors. She was sued by auctioneers for fees, by State governments for taxes, by her single-minded stepchildren for a share in the vanishing estate. Month ago she filed a petition for bankruptcy. Last fortnight 780 ft. of her waterfront property and the Wigwam, once an impressive exhibit crammed with Indian bric-a-brac, now a tumbled ruin, were auctioned off to Crown Corp. for $252,000, none of which will end in the hands of Mrs. Croker. A remaining 9,500 ft. of Palm Beach waterfront will be sold next month. Last week Mrs. Croker wailed to-the press: "I have no place to go. ... I have spent every penny I ever had. ..."

Crown Corp.'s purchase was no bargain.

Along with the property went $800,000 to be paid in back taxes, a vast amount of debts. And Beula Croker's legal affairs are still in such a mess that it may take two or three years of hard litigation to clear the title to all her property.

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