Knight's Gambit

Fortnight ago one of Manhattan's most fabulous characters, known to every reporter in town yet mentioned rarely and discreetly in the press, blew the lid off his own story by standing on his head at the Metropolitan Opera House. By so doing, in the midst of a brilliant host of spectators who had gathered to celebrate opera's seasonal opening, Richard Allen Knight became news.

Dick Knight was a Texas boy, with a big body, big head, and big ideas about getting on in the world. He went north to study law at Harvard. In 1924, armed with a degree and a recommendation from Felix Frankfurter (now an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), he headed for Manhattan. Two things he wanted. One was money. The other: to be known and admired by everybody who was anybody in the Big City.

Four years later Richard Knight had a $200,000 bank account, was earning more than $80,000 a year. He specialized in sensational divorce cases. Not yet 30, Lawyer Knight lived in a suite at the St. Regis. He drove a Cadillac, had spent a week on the Riviera with a celebrated prima donna, boasted that he called Mrs. Vincent Astor by her first name.

These triumphs were achieved by Richard Knight because: 1) his appearance was formidable and extraordinary; 2) in his calm Texas drawl he could be more shocking, more amusing, frequently more rude than the people he was subtly courting. He was also a clever lawyer. His business thrived. He was not merely asked to Newport and Palm Beach; he was invited again & again. He had hundreds of acquaintances, few intimate friends.

Then something happened to Dick Knight. One autumn Manhattan's stock-market collapsed; but it was not that. He began to drink hard, and kept it up for seven years; but it was not that either. It was a delusion of grandeur, he thought later, brought on by too much money and power: that and boredom, the emptiness of going through the same old triumphs. Dick Knight began to act in a way that no longer amused anybody. He threw his weight around, wrecked his friends' apartments, kicked the windows out of a taxicab, got arrested on Fifth Avenue.

After a while his money ran low, his friends were out when he went to call on them, his law business went to pot. At that point Richard Knight pulled himself together and got down to work again. He acquired a house on Long Island. His friends forgot his recent unlovely behavior, once more found him irresistibly amusing. He married handsome Dorothy Ledyard, daughter of a distinguished Manhattan attorney. They had two children.

Last week apparently something had once more gone wrong for Richard Knight. His wife was in Reno, suing for divorce.

He had been arrested on a charge of second-degree burglary for breaking into a neighbor's home, making off with two caged birds and a radio, which he said were really his. (Case was dismissed.) He had gone to Reno, hoping to persuade Mrs. Knight to drop her suit, "succeeded only in creating a rumpus," according to the New York Daily Mirror.

Into the crowded bar of the Metropolitan Opera house went Richard Knight between the acts. He was feeling reckless. Photographers crouched between tables, exploding bulbs in the faces of bored patrons. Richard Knight lowered his head, took off in a dive across the room. He tried to balance by his hands on the brass rail beside the bar. To Debutante Mary Steele he cried: "Hiya, babe! I bet you can't do this!" He turned a cartwheel. Miss Steele, startled, spilled her glass of water.

Presently a guard arrived, led him firmly away from the Metropolitan--but not before he had posed for photographers, standing on his head on the sidewalk. Next morning reporters found Richard Knight in his Waldorf-Astoria apartment, inquired how he had liked the opera. "Enormously," he answered. A newsman asked whether Mrs. Knight would be upset by his antics. Said Lawyer Knight: "Oh, no. We get along beautifully." Then he started packing his bags, announced that he was heading next for Pago Pago.

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