Unsealing Divorce

While researching the third novel in a trilogy for the Durant Family Saga, I tracked down and unsealed a divorce file from 1898. After this, I was left with a dilemma, what to do and how to unfurl the story about a man who covered up his adultery in an attempt to protect his reputation while battling a lawsuit.

My main character, William West Durant and his wife Janet went through a very nasty and public divorce trial in 1895 which was tossed out by the judge, only to be granted months later. The reason? Nobody knew. The last biography written on the Durants from 1980 did not state why, and after contacting Durant descendants I learned, they did not know either.

William West Durant’s father, Doctor Thomas C. Durant, was head of the Union Pacific Railroad while building the Transcontinental Railroad after the Civil War. Doc Durant, as he was known, is a leading character in the tv series Hell on Wheels and his biography is part of an American Experience documentary on the Transcontinental. He died in 1895 and left his son, William with a rail line and half million acres of land in the Adirondack wilderness. William led a lavish and public lifestyle.

Sealing divorce files from public viewing can come in extremely handy for celebrities trying to keep their personal lives private. However, there may be cases where the file can be unsealed. When The Star Tribune tried to access the musical artist, Prince’s sealed divorce files from the 1990s, his ex-wife sued. The presiding judge, however, sided with the Tribune, stating “access to civil court documents is fundamental to a democratic state”.

Similarly, The New York Times filed a suit to unseal Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce file in September 2016 arguing that allegations against Trump for sexual assault were an ongoing campaign controversy and the divorce case might shed light on the validity of the allegations. The New York State Supreme Court disagreed. The court could find no reason why the 1990 divorce needed to be made public knowledge. 

And when Alva Vanderbilt sought a divorce from her husband William in 1895 for adultery her lawyer wrote a letter to his wife about keeping the records sealed.

“How indignant they are (the press),” he wrote, “not to be able to get any of the particulars. Imagine what a to-do they would have made if they had got hold of those if they can cover a whole broadside with nothing. I think the case has been well managed in that at least there has been no filth in sight, the whole thing has been kept profoundly secret.” 

Divorce amongst celebrities has always been fodder for the press, so it didn’t surprise me that William West Durant wanted his sealed in 1898. Besides being the son of Doc. Durant, he was famous in his own right for the grand camps he built in the Adirondack Mountains. 

There were only two reasons divorces were granted back in 1898, a spouse had to prove cruelty or adultery. William sued his wife Janet for divorce in 1895, claiming she was having an affair with her doctor. She counter-sued claiming cruelty. They both lost, the judge stating they did not prove their case. Then, mysteriously, several months later they were granted a divorce in August 1898.

Below are some excerpts from an article about the Durant divorce melodrama from the New York World (August 4, 1898) which reads like a soap opera:

“People talked of the Durants as the ideal family. They had everything, they worshipped each other. Their marriage was a dream of happiness …Yet trouble was brewing….the three little children wept when they learned that their papa and their beautiful mama no longer loved each other.”

Their divorce decree was sealed, the final decision shrouded in secrecy, and I sought to find out why. New York State is one of the few states that allows divorce records to be partially or totally sealed. But while digging up information, I was informed by a law clerk at the New York State law library that anyone can access a sealed divorce file after the 100 years are up. Several emails and phone calls later, I discovered the Durant divorce record was housed in the New York City Surrogate Courthouse’s Division of Old Records in Manhattan.

Prior to my visit to the basement of the Division of Old Records in Manhattan, I had been on a long sojourn looking for primary material on William West Durant. I had combed through his collection of letters at the Library of Congress. There, you have to have an official i.d. just to get in the door of the manuscript collections.

The staff wear police-style uniforms and make you sign in; they ask you to put all of your belongings in a locker; you can only use the pencils and paper they provide, and; they check your laptop before you leave to make sure you have not sequestered any historical documents. Imagine my surprise then, when William’s divorce file was plunked down unceremoniously in front of me and the clerk said, “Someone really wanted this sealed from the public.” I tried to hide my shock that he even found the record hidden in the stacks of manila files that covered floor to ceiling in the basement of this 19th-century building in downtown Manhattan.  

I looked at the old paper, the color of tea, broke the thrice-waxed seal and carefully unfolded the court document. The papers were so brittle I could hear them crinkle in my hands and I desperately hoped they wouldn’t tear. That was futile, as one wrong move and I had torn a small corner of one of the pages. I looked around. No one was paying any attention to me. I sighed with relief, then gasped when I read the first few lines. 

It was the Irish maid, Bridget, that did William in (but not in the way one would think). Janet had hired a private investigator and discovered that William had assumed a fake identity and was living with another woman in an apartment in New York City.  Bridget was William’s maid and was called to testify against him. My discovery made it into the novel, but I was plagued by a pressing issue: does the public have a right to know about intimate details of people’s private lives when they use the courts to settle civil disputes? Would it have made a difference if the Durant divorce file had been made public back in 1898? I think it would. 

What mattered most to William, besides his Great Camp architecture that he pioneered, was the image he cultivated over time—his legacy. Besides sealing his divorce file so no one would find out he was an adulterer, he insisted on protecting his image while fighting a lawsuit waged by his sister Ella over their inheritance. This lawsuit was well documented in the press during the time period as well as the 1903 court documents I found at the Adirondack Museum archives.

After their father’s death in 1885, Ella Durant reluctantly gave up her power of attorney to William. She took off to live in London with the promise of a monthly allowance of $200 (equivalent to ~$2,000 now) and one-third of the Durant estate. When William sold his father’s Adirondack Railroad company for $600,000 (~$2.7 million in today’s dollars), while retaining the deeds to thousands of acres of Adirondack land, he never told his sister how much he made on the transaction.

He then went on to build a $200,000 steam yacht (Utowana), which he showed off by sailing with his family throughout Europe and at the Royal Yacht races in Cowes, Isle of Wight. News of her brother’s adventures reached Ella in England. Realizing he was spending the Durant fortune, Ella sued for an accounting of the Durant estate, but only after beseeching him several times for her share of the inheritance.

At one point, while William was in London visiting, Ella met him for dinner. When she inquired about his lavish lifestyle and questioned him about her money, he became irate and told her: “If you were a man I’d shoot you, because you…doubt my integrity.”

Dueling with his sister to defend his honor was not an option, but when Ella finally moved back to the States and sued, William allowed the lawsuit to drag on for years, costing him thousands in lawyers’ fees. William’s defense at his sister’s trial focused mainly on his father leaving no will and poor record keeping. He obfuscated as much as possible during his testimony.

He claimed that Ella, being a woman, did not know how to manage money. While it was true Ella had lost a substantial sum when she lent it to a Parisian Count for an investment, her handling of the inheritance was more commendable than William’s. He lost everything to his father’s archenemy Collis P. Huntington when he borrowed cash to continue his ventures using the Durant Adirondack land holdings as collateral. 

His strategy also included throwing a shadow over his sister’s reputation, claiming she often met with young men late into the evening unchaperoned and was thrown out of the house by their father because of her questionable reputation. At one point Ella’s lawyer asks William why he chose to tarnish Ella’s reputation as a defense and William states, “Because if all that she says about me were true, I would be a scoundrel of the first water.”  

William’s defense that his sister could not be trusted because of her questionable reputation belied the fact that at the same time as the trial was happening, he was carrying on an affair with a woman other than his wife. It says a lot about the character of someone who seeks to seal documents that are damaging to themselves while simultaneously presenting documents that prove damaging to someone else. While writing the third novel in the trilogy, The Night is Done, I had to determine how to reveal this story without turning William into a despicable character. 

In the end, William was a tragic figure. He went from one of the largest land-owners in the Adirondacks in the late 1800s to a hotel clerk at a small resort. He lost everything: his father’s Adirondack railroad: over a quarter-million acres of land; and his family. His downfall can be blamed for a variety of reasons, including his lack of business acumen. However, his unwillingness to admit culpability in lawsuits waged against him by both his sister and wife played a major role. By the end of this life, William was widely known as visionary for his work in the Adirondacks, an image he fought to maintain, at a great financial cost, to maintain a façade.

—

THE NIGHT IS DONE, Sheila M. Myers

– Awarded the 2017 Best Book of Fiction by the Adirondack Center for Writing-

“Myers writes with skill and has chosen well in deeply researching the Durant saga, which remarkably parallels Greek tragedy. It’s a truly engrossing story, and Myers does it justice.” – Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

William and Ella Durant, heirs to a bygone fortune, are recounting the events that led to the Durant family downfall during the Gilded Age. In 1931 William returns to visit the estate he once possessed in the Adirondacks to speak with the current owner, copper magnate Harold Hochschild, who is writing a history of the region and wants to include a biography of William. Simultaneously, Ella is visiting with an old family friend and former lover, Poultney Bigelow, journalist with Harpers Magazine, who talks her into telling her own story.

William recounts the height of his glory, after his father’s death in 1885 when he takes control of the Adirondack railroad assets, travels the world in his yacht and dines with future kings. However, his fortune takes a turn during the Financial Panic of 1893 and amid accusations of adultery and cruelty.

Ella’s tale begins when she returned from living abroad to launch a lawsuit against her brother for her fair share of the Durant inheritance.

The court provides a stage for the siblings to tear each other’s reputation apart: William for his devious business practices and failure to steward the Durant land holdings, and Ella for her unconventional lifestyle. Based on actual events, and historic figures, The Night is Done is a tale about the life-altering power of revenge, greed, and passion.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing