Untangling the Life of Xesia Y. Z.

Newspaper story about Xesia (1891) 

As a young journalist who covered the theater, Allan Forman hung around eavesdropping and hoping for a glimpse of the leading ladies.  

In 1886, Allan’s long edgy article, “Around the Stage Door, Men Who Haunt It and Girls Who Pass through It,” was syndicated widely in the U.S.

Surely he spoke from experience in describing the many ways that men made fools of themselves by fancying actresses and singers, married and unmarried.

 One that "knew" an actress --
sketch used in Allan's article

In 1900, he met and married his own actress, Xesia Yrsa Zephania Carlstedt. 

Really? you say.

Do you mean the Swedish-born Xesia Yrsa Zephania whose career never quite took off even though she acted in such memorable plays as “The Noble Son,” “The Pearl of Pekin,” and “The Corsair”? 

Do you mean Xesia Yrsa Zephania who inherited thousands of dollars from her former lover, a Swedish baron named Falkenberg to whom she was promised in marriage by her father, a consul general whose home was located next door to the baron’s castle?

The papers reported that she ran away to America to be free of entanglements. 

Cut to 1891.

“A Man About Town,” starring Xesia, has just flopped in out-of-town tryouts. The cast practically walked back to New York, critics say. Arriving home, the hapless Xesia received a thick envelope from a lawyer detailing the bequest of “the man who loved her so well and so unsuccessfully.” 

It was the baron. He left her $50,000!

She probably did receive the money, although some whispered that in fact the baron had rejected Xesia because she lacked aristocratic lineage.  

It’s not as if her family was undistinguished, however. Xesia’s father, Axel B. C. Carlstedt, descended from a long line of musicians and composers. The position of organist in the churches of Sodra Villie and Orsjo had been held by a member of the Carlstedt family for more than 130 years.

Axel emigrated from Sweden to the U. S. in 1872. 

Upon arriving, he moved to Massachusetts, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, earned a doctorate, married an American woman, and eventually founded the South Side College of Music in Chicago.

Axel fathered 11 children. Some were born in Sweden during his first marriage but the details are hard to figure out.

What matters is that he went about naming them “in the most delightful way,” to quote Mary Poppins.

Since his own name began with the initials ABC, Axel continued the pattern with his children.

Thus:

Axel Bernhard Conrad, Jr.

Dagobert Edvard Fritiof

                            Gustaf Harald Julius

Knut Leonard Maltidius

                             Nellie Olivia Pauline

                                           Quelie Rosalie Sophie

Theresa Urania Vilhelmina

                             and Xesia Yrsa Zephania.

The names of the last three children did not fit the alphabetical pattern but exceeded expectations for ingenuity. They were: 

              Aberta Agir Ostgota, Detolfta Johanna Marie, and Bror Tretton Methodius.                    

While Axel taught music and became a papa repeatedly, several of his children, including Xesia, gravitated toward music and theater. She toured the country drawing slight attention for her performances, for no Lillie Langtry was she.

Meanwhile, Allan ran his magazine, The Journalist, and wrote about everything. During the 1890s, he addressed “The Cigarette Question,” “The Ways of Blackmailers, a risky business that doesn’t always pay,” and “The Typewriter Question.”  

He also complained about “Eating to Honor Somebody”:

It always seems a trifle absurd to me, to call together a lot of men to eat in honor of somebody. The respect expressed by inducing dyspepsia may be genuine. Ovations and oysters, sympathy and soup, releves and roasts, enthusiasm and entrees, homage and hominy, compliments and champagne, may all go very well together but . . . I should prefer a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a quiet corner.

Allan did not hesitate to be honored with a
Chop Suey dinner, given by the Blue Pencil Club 
(1901)

After their marriage, Xesia and Allan lived in Brooklyn until Allan’s father died in 1908. Then Allan retired and began a renovation and expansion of Nabichaugue, the family’s Long Island estate. He and Xesia lived there for the rest of their lives.

When Allan and Xesia renovated Nabichaugue before
World War I, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a long story about it.

After Allan’s death in 1914 the Baroness, as she now started to call herself, drew quite a bit of publicity when she started farming at Nabichaugue to help the war effort.  

It may be a far cry from singing grand opera in the presence of cheering thousands to growing seed corn . . .  but it is understood that Mrs. Allan Forman of this place agrees that producing seed corn, when you hit it right, is fully as pleasant and almost as remunerative as appearing nightly in the footlights.

She was an acclaimed opera singer all along.

Xesia Y. Z. Carlstedt Forman;
passport photo, 1930s

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/04/xesia.html?m=1

 

Adventures of Allan Forman

Advertising card, 1890s
(New York Public Library)

Allan Forman was born by the beach on Long Island, in a cottage built by his Mayflower ancestors. He grew up in a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.  His father had made a fortune from warehousing snuff and tobacco during the Civil War. 

Educated at the prestigious Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Allan started writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in his teens. The paper’s editor, Thomas H. Kinsella, sent him to San Francisco to cover riots incited by an Irish labor leader named Denis Kearney. The violent fury directed at Chinese immigrants ended in death and destruction, and disgusted the young reporter.

Allan went on to Williams College in Massachusetts and always made a fuss about it, although he did not graduate.  

 Back in Brooklyn, Allan’s stories appeared regularly in newspapers and journals. Now he had two important mentors: Samuel S. Conant, editor of Harper’s Weekly, along with Kinsella of the Eagle.

In February 1885, Conant disappeared into a nineteenth-century melodrama involving a barroom, a watch & chain, and a man resembling him who might have taken a train to Florida.

Part of a search party, Allan scrambled around the beach at Coney Island, looking desperately for Conant and interviewing the proprietor of the Ocean House hotel where the editor might have been seen last.  

S. S. Conant never turned up.

But Allan continued to develop a nice style. Here’s the opening of an article entitled “The New York Crook”:

Not long ago I chanced to meet a lawyer somewhat prominent in a certain class of criminal case. After a few moments’ chat, I invited him to the theatre.

“No, I have to see a client of mine. Come with me and I’ll show you a new phase of life. I’ll introduce you to the ‘crooks.’”

The lawyer’s invitation chimed in with my lazy mood, and, hailing a passing hansom, we were whirled to our destination . . .

And here he is writing about dinner in Chinatown:

“Come and dine with me,” was the cheering invitation extended to me by a jolly New York lawyer of Bohemian tendencies. But I knew my man, and was aware of his penchant for mousing into all sorts of out-of-the-way quarters of the city where he fairly reveled in dirt and mystery and strange viands, so I lit another cigarette and lazily drawled, “Where?”

Illustration for Allan Forman's story about Chinatown

Already well-known in the world of the New York press, Allan really arrived when he took the helm of the first magazine devoted to journalism, The Journalist. The weekly was a few years old when he became editor in 1886.

At the time, press clubs had been established in most major U.S. cities. But reporters, publishers, and illustrators missed having a publication dedicated to their profession. The Journalist didn’t always fit the bill because Forman published whatever struck his fancy, but he would lead it for 22 years. 

Unfortunately, too, he was for sale – as scandals revealed in 1891 and 1905.  

It turned out that Allan had deals with the New York Life Insurance Company and the Mutual Life Insurance Company. He offered himself as a “press specialist.” For a fee, he used his influence to place flattering stories about the companies in newspapers around the country.

He might praise old management over new management, discredit newspaper investigations into corporate corruption or “spin” bad news. In fact, Allan may have been the true father of public relations.

Despite the bad publicity about Allan’s subterfuge, he carried on. However, the prestigious Lotos Club kicked him out for violating house rules and endangering others, so perhaps he was upset about something.

Subsequently, a series of exposes about the insurance business appeared in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The World.  A legislative committee (counseled by future Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes) delved into the workings of the big companies. Allan did not testify, but one of his colleagues said that Forman earned $1 to $2 per line for six 250-word stories which editorialized in the guise of news.*

Frontispiece, 1889 issue of The Journalist

Once again, Forman remained untarnished. But he must have been running low on cash.

In 1896, he brought a suit to have his father declared insane after his mother refused to give money to one of Allan’s creditors. Justice Osborne of the Brooklyn Supreme Court accepted the testimony of two doctors: the elder Forman was competent to manage his own affairs.  

Then Allan’s first wife, Florence, divorced him, so he went off to Egypt for two years and left The Journalist in the hands of Marguerita Hamm, a pioneering woman reporter married to the jolly lawyer who lured him to dinner in Chinatown.

Allan had always loved the theater and occasionally wrote for The Dramatic Times. He liked to hang around backstage and gather gossip. In 1900 he remarried to a Swedish actress with the incomparable name of Xesia Yrsa Zephania Carlstedt.

*Ultimately, revelations about political slush funds and investing for self-gain led to significant regulation of the insurance industry.  

See part 2: April 20, 2017.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/03/adventures-of-allan-forman.html?m=1

Blue Pencil Boys

In 1899 when they started the Blue Pencil Club, the men were a bunch of rambunctious, though well-established, writers.

They rented some rooms on Spruce Street in lower Manhattan. Around the corner, the row of buildings that housed the city’s newspapers reached to the sky with a gold dome and towers.

The club was a mess, though:  The floor, when covered at all, was carpeted with sawdust. The ceiling decorations were mostly cobwebs. . .  The furnishings consisted of bare tables, tubs, beer kegs, a telephone and a bar.^*

From time to time, police busted the members for lack of a liquor license. But who had the heart to penalize such rollicking consumers of theater, literature, and Chinese culture?

Purveyors of wit that has, 117 years later, lost some of its luster, they joyously took down Tammany Hall, pompous publishers, and business titans.

But it should be noted they were rather smug themselves.

The point of the club was to have a good time, and to publish the Blue Pencil Magazine which they packed with doggerel, drawings, and tales ridiculous and fantastic.

Blue Pencil Magazine, cover of first issue

And the names of these men?

They were Billy Burgundy and Mickey Finn (pseudonyms) and Billy Fales.

And there was Forman, the pince nez’d scion of one of Brooklyn’s first families who got his start when the legendary Irish editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Thomas Kinsella, sent the lad to San Francisco in 1877 to cover an anti-immigrant uprising fomented by a labor leader named Denis Kearney.

Advertising card for cigarettes featuring Allan Forman

Forman ended up reporting on the Sand Lot riot, a three-night rampage during which four Chinese men were killed. He went on to write about theater, manners and the like. For 25 years, he edited The Journalist, the nation’s first magazine for writers and editors.

His essay, “How to Eat an Orange,” which appeared in Northwest Magazine in 1890, was well-received as they used to say.

As for Billy Burgundy!  Why would anyone named Oliver Victor Limerick need a pen name?

A Mississippi native who trained to be an allopath, Limerick was an incorrigible joker. He came to New York to edit a medical journal. After a while, he decided that he would rather write stories than practice medicine.

Limerick’s amusing advice column, “Billy Burgundy’s Balm for Burdened Bosoms,” and his books, such as Billy Burgundy’s Tales in Toothsome Slang, satirized romance:  

Percival was the confidential valve in the Borated Talcum Powder Trust, and drew down a voluptuous salary for his services in behalf of the Chafe-Allaying Industry. . .

Ernest Jarrold appeared on the frontispiece of
the February 1901 issue of Blue Pencil Magazine.

Then there was Mickey Finn, a.k.a. Ernest Jarrold, an Englishman who had been hanging around Newspaper Row for years, contributing short stories to The New York Evening Sun, Harper’s Weekly and other magazines. He often poked at Irish immigrants.

And there was Billy Fales – of whom his friends wrote:

Brave, brilliant Billy! No man or woman ever heard from his lips of the great grief that paralyzed his ambition and made a wreck of his career, for there was no yesterday on his calendar,

and

He often said that life was a joke and he generally appeared to make this epigram the maxim of his career.

A poet, essayist, diplomat, attorney, and adventurer, Fales bore the nickname “the Encyclopedia.” Married thrice, indifferent father of two sons, he caroused Manhattan, eating and drinking heavily.

Chow Chop Suey at Mong Sing Wah in Chinatown, the spaghetti at Maria Da Prato’s on MacDougal Street, the oyster stalls at Fulton Market, and the Lomo de Puerco con Platanos at Braguglia & Carreno on Broadway; Billy loved it all.

Artist's sketch of "Spaghetti Night" at Maria del Prato's

He steered the members of the Blue Pencil Club through the night, returning at dawn to his home on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights.

They called him, as many had been called before, “The King of Bohemia.”  

*See posts on William E. S. Fales, 2/1/17 + 1/25/17 & about his mother, Imogene C. Fales, 5/25/16; also post on Allan Forman, March 22, 2017.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/02/blue-pencil-boys.html?m=1