Famous [century old] Adirondacks Murder Gets New Life - basis for Theodore Dreiser novel
Hoodoo
12/02/2005
http://music.yahoo.com/read/news/26548051
When Chester Gillette killed his pregnant lover Grace Brown on an
Adirondack lake in July 1906, it was destined to become an immortal
murder.
The tragic story became the basis for Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel,
"An American Tragedy," a saga subsequently spun into movies,
television programs, plays, songs, true crime books — and a new
production at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. "An American
Tragedy," with music by Tobias Picker, premieres Friday.
"It's the murder that will never die," said Susan Perkins, executive
director of the Historical Society in Herkimer County, where Brown's
death occurred and Gillette was eventually tried and sent to the
electric chair. "The fascination with it over the years has been
unabated."
For communities in three upstate New York counties that share the
story's history, the opera helps launch the murder's 100th
anniversary. A series of summertime events are planned, including a
re-enactment of Gillette's trial and a special wreath-laying ceremony
on Big Moose Lake on July 11, the day Brown was killed.
Perkins and about 100 others will travel to New York City to see the
opera on Dec. 16.
"I don't even pretend to understand why people are still interested
after 99 years," said Charlie Adams, a tour boat operator on Big Moose
Lake. "It just astounds me."
Chester and Grace's story has kept the public spellbound since the
beginning.
Brown, known as "Billie," was a farm girl from South Otselic in
Chenango County, who worked at the Gillette Skirt Co. in Cortland,
about 30 miles south of Syracuse. There, she met Chester Gillette, the
nephew of the owner and the son of Salvation Army missionaries.
Despite Gillette's upbringing, history portrays him as a shiftless,
would-be social climber.
After a brief courtship, Brown was pregnant. In a series of emotional
letters, Brown implored the reluctant Gillette to marry her. He barely
acknowledged her.
In July 1906, the pair headed for what was supposed to be a
clandestine trip to the Adirondack Mountains — Brown still hoping for
a proposal of marriage. After several stops, they ended up at Big
Moose Lake, a large, shallow wilderness lake in the central
Adirondacks.
There, the couple took an afternoon rowboat ride, during which
Gillette allegedly struck Brown in the head with a tennis racket, she
fell into the lake and drowned.
Brown's body was found the next day in the lake along with the
overturned rowboat. Gillette was spotted walking away with his luggage
and arrested three days later in nearby Inlet, where he had gone to
meet two women friends. Soon after, the sheriff found the tennis
racket buried under a log.
The monthlong trial made headlines across the country. The jury needed
just five hours to convict Gillette, who claimed Brown drowned
accidentally and that he panicked and fled. In March 1908, he was
executed in the electric chair at Auburn State Prison.
Almost immediately, the story began imbedding itself in America's
psyche, Perkins said. In November 1906, a company started selling
booklets containing reprints of Grace's letters, which had been read
into evidence at Gillette's trial. In 1907, Maude Gould, a piano
teacher from Ilion, wrote a song about the case, "Entreating." A folk
ballad appeared in the Adirondack lumber camps.
The secret affair, sense of mystery and wilderness backdrop were among
the ingredients that made the case so enticing, said Perkins, who
likened the frenzy to the O.J. Simpson or Scott Peterson trials of
contemporary times.
The historical society still has documents. The courtroom where the
trial was held and the cell where Gillette waited it out still exist,
though neither building is actively used anymore.
The Gillette factory is now an appliance store and the houses where
Brown and Gillette boarded while living in Cortland still stand. The
Brown family farm in South Otselic has changed hands but is still
there, too. At Big Moose Lake, the boathouse has been converted to an
apartment building.
The story might have faded from public interest if not for Dreiser's
novel, which revived interest and transformed it into an archetypal
story, said Joseph Brownell, a retired State University of New York at
Cortland geography professor who co-authored a 1986 factual account of
the murder, "Adirondack Tragedy."
Following Dreiser's novel, "An American Tragedy" made it to the New
York City stage in 1926. There was another play in 1931 and in the
same year, a Paramount film, starring Sylvia Sidney. In the 1950s, Lux
Video Theater did a television take, with actor John Derek.
The most famous adaptation is the 1951 film, "A Place in the Sun,"
which starred Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters
and won six Oscars.
On the Net:
Herkimer County Historical Society: http://www.rootsweb.com/ 7/8nyhchs
Cortland County Historical Society: http://www.rootsweb.com/
7/8nycortla/chsfe.htm
Metropolitan Opera: http://www.metoperafamily.org
AndrewJ
Grace Brown's hometown of South Otselic -- people there are STILL
obsessed with the murder case.
(Will Brentwood, CA residents still be discussing the OJ Simpson case
in 2094, I wonder?) The great-grandmother of one of my closest
childhood friends, incidentally, was one of Grace Brown's
schoolteachers.
-- Andrew
leno...@yahoo.com
the 1940s, I think) and I once said to my mother a few years ago "oh
God, what if he'd tried to marry into OUR family?" She said: "Are you
crazy? Why would he want to marry into OUR family? We'd have had to be
RICH!"
Though it seems to me that anyone who could afford a camp there would
seem rich to that creep.....
Lenona.
robertc...@yahoo.com
Hoodoo wrote:
> Famous Adirondacks Murder Gets New Life
>
> 12/02/2005
> http://music.yahoo.com/read/news/26548051
>
> When Chester Gillette killed his pregnant lover Grace Brown on an
> Adirondack lake in July 1906, it was destined to become an immortal
> murder.
>
> The tragic story became the basis for Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel,
> "An American Tragedy," a saga subsequently spun into movies,
> production at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. "An American
> Tragedy," with music by Tobias Picker, premieres Friday.
>
Just a word about Theodore Dreiser, whose novel "made" this case. I
read _An American Tragedy_ many years ago, and just recently returned
to him, reading _Sister Carrie_ and _Jennie Gerhardt_. For all the
negative criticism of Dreiser that has appeared over the years, he
remains a compelling writer. It was difficult to put _Sister Carrie_
down (I mean the book, not the character), and _Jennie Gerhardt_, while
not as powerful, still presents a
convincing portrayal of the society of the time. Dreiser's
characterization is his strong suit. He creates believable people and
makes you care about them. He involves them in situations that bring
forth all the assumptions of the era in which he wrote, and lets you
watch as the consequences unfold--usually not in their favor.
Dreiser's downfall, as far as many critics are concerned is his style.
I have never found it a problem. There is nothing unique about the
style Dreiserian, but it is sufficiently strong that the reader is not
put off by it--at least this reader wasn't. Concerning his style,
critic Donald Pizer has written:
"Dreiser criticism is also still often concerned with the related issue
of his verbal and fictional ineptness. Even Mencken, the staunchest of
Dreiser's early champions, could not ignore this aspect of Dreiser's
fiction, and it was of course one of the major reasons for the New
Critics' contempt for his work. Since the late 1960s, however, a number
of critics (most notably Ellen Moers) have discovered considerable
subtlety and even "finese" in Dreiser's prose style, while still others
(Julian Markels and Robert Penn Warren, for example) have argued that
the novel as a form creates its effect as much through symbolic
constructs as through language, and that Dreiser's success with such
constructs explains his success as a novelist."
Dreiser is a novelist you should not miss. His books are long, if not
expecially complex in plot, but he is worth the effort. Some of his
incidents--like the long decline of Hurstwood in _Sister Carrie_--are
unequalled in their expression and in the novelist's knowledge of the
human heart.
AndrewJ
attended Oberlin College's preparatory school in 1902-03 (after the
Grace Brown murder it was misreported that he'd attended Oberlin
College itself, an error still cropping up in news accounts today).
Anyway, one of Gillette's Oberlin prep classmates was a boy named Harry
Lewis, who as Sinclair Lewis would become one of Theodore Dreiser's
main literary rivals in the 1920s.
-- Andrew