Banks and Horses
Just two stables have ever had multiple Triple Crown winners and only one — Belair Stud in Maryland — can boast a father-son Triple Crown duo. The horses of Belair Stud were some of the greatest thoroughbreds in the world: Triple Crown winners Gallant Fox and Omaha (the father/son combination), Nasrullah, Nashua and many others made the stable a legend in American racing. Nashua alone won more than $1 million and only lost one race his entire career.
They were raising winners at Belair Stud back when Maryland was an English colony. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Belair Stud was the premier stable in America and one of the best in the world. The stable was down the road from Belair Mansion, home to the Woodward family, which owned the horse farm.
By the 1950s, the Woodward family was old money. In 1874 James T. Woodward joined the board of directors of Hanover National Bank (now Chase Manhattan and JP Morgan) and in 1876 he was elected president. He served in that capacity for 34 years, when he turned over the reins to his nephew, William Woodward.
William Woodward Sr. was the owner of Belair Stud and the father of Billy Woodward, who followed in his father’s footsteps in both the horse business and banking industry. Billy might have come from money and privilege, but he was no shrinking violet. As an ensign in the U. S. Navy, Billy won a Purple Heart and managed to survive a torpedo attack that sank his ship.
Upon his return from the war, he became known as an “international sportsman” and horse breeder. He was passionate, reckless and the quintessential playboy. It was in 1943 that Billy returned to New York City, where his mother, Elsie, was the reigning queen of high society and his father was a force in the banking industry. William Sr. was also involved, albeit briefly, with a 27-year-old radio actress who had been born Angeline Crowell on a farm in Kansas but changed her name to the more theatrical Ann Eden.
Ann’s lineage was as opposite Billy’s as you could get. Her mother dispatched taxicabs and her father left soon after she was born. But she was beautiful, smart and talented and destined for things bigger than Kansas could provide. She managed to make her way to New York City, get a job in radio and by the mid-1940s, ise to the top of the field. She won the odd title of “Most Beautiful Woman in Radio” and in 1942, her beauty caught the eye of William Woodward Sr.
At some point in 1942, William Woodward Sr. passed the 27-year-old Ann on to his son, five years her junior. It was love at first sight and very quickly the two were wed.
While her son’s marriage started off happy, Elsie Woodward, the socialite who ran the most exclusive parlor of the New York 400, saw her new daughter-in-law as a gold digger who latched on to her son merely to get her hands on his $10 million fortune. Elsie considered Ann far below her in class and social skills and never accepted her into the family.
Years later, Elsie, then the dowager empress of New York high society, talked to friends about her relationship with Ann. She recalled the first time she saw the beautiful model/radio actress. Ann was too pretty, too voluptuous to be a good person, she thought.
“One look and I knew the whole story,” Elsie told her friends.
Elsie’s scorn was palpable and soon the Vanderbilts and Astors and the rest of the pearls and party gown crowd who attended Elsie’s parties picked up on it. Their rejection only served to fuel Ann’s drive to gain acceptance. “She had no innards, no inside,” a psychiatrist who treated Ann told author Susan Braudy. “All she wanted was to be Woodward.”
Billy’s sisters also froze off Ann. Even though she had been famous in her own right — her work on radio had gained the notice of The New York Times — she was too gaudy and flashy for their tastes. She once made the unforgivable faux pas of wearing red shoes with a blue dress and was seen smoking in public long before such behavior was tolerated in their circles.
There was only one woman in high society who ever really accepted Ann and that was because she was in a similar position. The woman was Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. Simpson, of course, was the American divorcee for whom Edward stepped down from the throne of Great Britain to marry.
photo of hunting party
The friction Ann felt in high society contributed to the problems at home. Both Ann and Billy had roving eyes that created fireworks. Billy’s rumored bisexuality only made things worse.
Billy and Ann had one of those relationships that was too fractious to keep together and too strong to break apart. They sparred openly in public over many things, not the least of which were her affairs with the likes of the Aga Khan and Franchot Tone and his with any number of debutantes.
Susan Braudy recalls one public fight where Ann shouted at Billy, “Why don’t you just bring a man in our bed! That’s what you want anyway!”
In private, the arguments crossed over into physical altercations with Ann fond of throwing ashtrays and Billy responding with a slap to the face. No permanent, serious damage was ever done and there are no reports of either ever showing up in public with a visible bruise.
dancing
In between fights there was obviously affection, as the couple soon had two children, William III (nicknamed Woody) and Jimmy, born in 1944 and 1947.
Perhaps it was the money that magnified things and made them seem bigger than ordinary. Maybe to Ann and Billy the fights went with the territory; the rarified air they breathed at the top of the social ladder made them fight and love harder than most couples. Whatever the reason, they never stayed angry and their only separation ended quickly.
As if to spite high society, they remained a couple that took the vow ’til death do us part seriously.
At a swank party for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Billy and Ann Woodward were noticeably agitated, guests would recall later, talking incessantly about the recent spate of burglaries in their upscale Oyster Bay, Long Island neighborhood.
Someone had been brazenly breaking into homes on the northeastern edge of Long Island in the middle of the night while residents slept. The gutsy burglar hadn’t hurt anyone, but Ann and Billy told friends they weren’t taking any chances.
There were signs their home was targeted, they claimed. Unidentified footprints were found on the grounds of the mansion and more than once, Ann’s lapdog had awakened her in the night with his barking. Food had gone missing and ammunition had been stolen, the pair told friends.
Other North Shore residents had also seen signs of the burglar and the talk at the October 29, 1955 party didn’t help allay any fears the Woodwards had as they returned to their 43-acre estate. The couple was sleeping in separate bedrooms in one wing of the house with their two children in another pair of rooms. The servants were living in the other wing of the estate.
No one at the party remembers Ann or Billy squabbling that night, although many guests do recall the event had been particularly boozy.
By the time the couple returned home, it was 1 a.m. and 11-year-old Woody and seven-year-old Jimmy were fast asleep in their beds. Ann and Billy bade each other good night and retired to their own rooms. Behind locked doors, Billy slept with a revolver nearby while Ann was armed with a double-barreled shotgun.
It was two hours later that Ann awoke to find her dog, Sloppy, barking at her open door. Ann told authorities she saw a “shadowy figure” near the door to Billy’s room, backlit against the pale moonlight streaming in from a hallway window. She reached for the 12-gauge shotgun and pulled the trigger.
Birdshot from the gun exploded from the muzzle of one barrel, a majority striking the wall next to the door. She pulled the trigger again and the second barrel fired, a scattering of pellets hitting the figure in the doorway.
home
“Almost immediately,” Ann testified later, “I realized it was my husband. I ran to help him and fell on the floor beside him.” Ann pulled herself away long enough to call for help. She summoned an ambulance, police and, in a move that some would use to damn her, an attorney.
Billy died on the floor of his mansion; one of the shotgun pellets had lodged in his brain. When police arrived at the scene, they found a distraught Ann on the floor near her husband.
“I did it,” she told them. “I thought it was the man who has been around here.”
Ann then collapsed into a lump on the floor and was incoherent until a doctor arrived and sedated her. Her attorney, Sol Rosenblatt, was well-connected in Nassau County and immediately began influencing the investigation, which later would be used by Ann’s opponents as evidence the whole thing had been a set-up.
Because of the wealth of the victim and the circumstances of his shooting, the normal flatfoots who would have investigated a homicide were pushed aside in favor of the Nassau County prosecutor and Oyster Bay Chief of Police. This would also give fuel for speculation.
Rosenblatt managed to convince the prosecutor to allow Ann to be taken to a hospital in Manhattan, and as a result homicide detectives would not be able to question her until almost 48 hours after the slaying.
The morning after the shooting, North Shore society was buzzing with rumor and gossip. At a luncheon attended by friends of the Woodwards the next day, the Duchess of Windsor summarized the feelings of the seen-it-all members of society’s elite.
about burglary
“Nothing like a murder in the country to cure what ails you,” she said, apparently unaware that Ann had not been charged with any wrongdoing.
The allegations of murder stuck, however. Not knowing that Billy’s estate left almost everything to his children in trust, her “friends” simply assumed that Ann had killed her husband to get at his money.
Nassau County police began investigating the incident and were quickly able to find the tramp that had been burglarizing the Oyster Bay homes. The man, Paul Wirths, admitted trying to break into the home when the shots rang out. There were some who believed Wirths had been paid by Elsie Woodward to make his claim and years later, Wirths tried to blackmail Ann using that story.
In the face of widespread press coverage, the district attorney convened a grand jury to investigate the shooting. Shortly after she buried her husband, Ann Woodward appeared before the grand jury and told her account of events.
The jurors took just 30 minutes to deliberate the facts and find that Ann had acted without malice and that the shooting was unintentional. She was completely exonerated in the eyes of the law.
The tongues continued to wag, however.
Even though Elsie Woodward had made no secret of her disdain for her daughter-in-law, many people believed that she had paid to make charges go away. Rather than subject the family to the public scandal of a murder trial, they reasoned, Elsie had opted for a cover-up.
police evidence
Quickly, Ann became persona non grata in New York Society. As Billy Woodward’s wife she was barely tolerated because she wasn’t born into the circle. As his widow and killer, she was ostracized. Behind her back they called her ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ or ‘the murderess.’ As the days went by the stories began to circulate about the “truth” behind the Woodward marriage and Billy’s death.
Over petit fours and champagne, the grande dames whispered that Ann had once been a prostitute. She had been previously married and had killed Billy when he discovered that her first marriage had never been legally ended. Unfortunately for Ann, the rumors gained a measure of truth when it came out that her father was not the “late Col. Crowell,” as was listed in the Woodwards’ wedding announcement, but was, in fact, alive and well and estranged from his daughter (he erroneously thought the actress Eve Arden was actually his child).
Conversely, Elsie Woodward’s prestige rose with her son’s death. She struck up a friendship with Frank Sinatra and Andy Warhol. Whether or not she believed her daughter-in-law murdered her son, she never let slip. She did, however, continue to reign over Ann and demand her presence at courtside.
“Mostly, the furs-and-pearls set took its cues from one of its dowager empresses, Elsie Woodward, whose visceral hatred (for Ann) was apparent despite a front of civility,” wrote Mike Dorning in a review of Braudy’s book. “The social invitations she issued only fed the rumor that Elsie had put family name ahead of legal justice and signed checks totaling $400,000 to end the criminal investigation.”
The Woodward boys were whisked off to European boarding schools shortly after their father’s death. They had slept through the shooting and could offer no helpful information to investigators. The move would have profound ramifications in later years, as neither boy was ever given a satisfactory explanation by mother or grandmother about the events leading to their father’s death. For the younger boy, Jimmy, Swiss boarding school would become a hellish place of self-loathing and undeserved guilt.
Ann continued to stand up in the face of a withering storm of scorn heaped on her from all sides. Elsie made it clear that Ann would have a hard time winning support from the Woodward family unless she bowed to the family’s demands and unfortunately, Billy had last amended his will when he and Ann were separated, leaving her relatively little property. Ann would have to make do on a $500,000 annual allowance and lost control of the racing stables and heirloom properties.
When Elsie made it clear that it was in Ann’s best interests to leave the United States for an extended period of mourning (not to be less than four years), she retreated, as so many do, into drugs, alcohol and meaningless relationships with some of Europe’s many titled but impoverished nobles. There had always been allegations of drug use by Ann and Billy, and their extramarital affairs were well-known, but Ann’s open cavorting set tongues to wagging.
Time passed, Ann grew older and eventually returned from Europe. The reception was still chilly.
It was 1975 — two decades after the shooting — that Ann was finally pushed too far. She had not had a good life in the intervening years and the entire Woodward clan had suffered as a result of the killing.
Jimmy Woodward managed to make it through Switzerland’s exclusive Le Rosey school (its alumni included Prince Rainier of Monaco, the Shah of Iran and the King of Belgium) and volunteered for service in Vietnam so he could serve with a friend who had been drafted. When his friend was killed, Jimmy eased the pain with drugs and drink. In his drunken stupor, he wrote his mother terrible letters accusing her of deliberately killing Billy. Jimmy’s delicate psyche continued to deteriorate as his drug abuse worsened.
Ann visited him once in a detox clinic. The visit was unpleasant. “Why did you shoot my father?” he asked. “Leave me in peace!” Braudy reports that Ann fled from the clinic in tears.
Jimmy became paranoid and convinced that people were spying on him through his television set. He attempted suicide by jumping out the window of a friend’s apartment and succeeded in breaking his arms and legs. It was while Jimmy was convalescing that he started seeing notorious prostitute Xaviera Hollander, author of the book The Happy Hooker. Hollander included several stories about Jimmy in her second book, Xaviera, Her Continuing Adventures, in a chapter called “Jimmy, Don’t Jump Again.”
In time, the stories about Ann Woodward reached author Truman Capote, who ingratiated himself with Elsie’s circle and began collecting anecdotes and gossip. The idea for a roman a clef — a novel based on real-life characters — began forming in Capote’s mind and Ann Woodward was at the center.
The curtain was about to come down on the second act of the Woodward family tragedy.
Capote never let the facts get in the way of a good story and wasn’t above using his skill as a storyteller to get back at those who had slighted him. When he and Ann quarreled at a debutante ball and Ann, her tongue loosened by drink, called him a “little faggot,” Truman responded by dubbing her ‘Miss Bang Bang.’
Mutual friends would recall later that Capote became almost infatuated with Ann Woodward’s story and collected every bit of gossip about her he could find. He would recite them at the drop of a hat, friends said, equating his mania for Ann with that of an obsessive-compulsive.
At the request of a friend who edited Ladies Home Journal, Truman penned a wicked story about Ann Hopkins, “a jazzy little carrot-top killer,” who resembled “a malicious Betty Grable.”
Capote’s anti-heroine was a woman of loose morals known as ‘Madame Marmalade’ by the boys of the French Riviera for a “trick she did using her tongue and jam.” The story proved too racy and too controversial for Ladies Home Journal and Capote looked elsewhere for a market.
According to the story, Billy discovered that Ann had been married before and had not gone through with a divorce. The bigamy charge would have allowed Billy to divorce Ann and cast her off without a cent, Capote surmised, and that’s why she killed him.
Years later, many members of New York society told author Susan Braudy that Capote’s account of the events and motives were “positively factual.”
In September 1975, Ann received a shocking telephone call from a friend in the publishing business. Capote had sold his story to Esquire magazine. “In a few weeks, everyone would be talking about the thinly disguised Capote story in which someone very like Ann Woodward turns out to be a bigamist and the former girlfriend of a gangster who traps her rich society husband into marrying her by becoming pregnant,” Braudy wrote.
As the publication date of the Esquire issue neared, Ann became increasingly forlorn and depressed.
An argument with Jimmy on the eve of the magazine’s publication drove her over the edge. As she prepared for bed, she made up her face with makeup, lipstick, eye shadow and mascara.
“Like the actress she once was, she seemed posed for a lovely death scene,” Braudy wrote.
Then Ann Woodward lay down on her side on her bed, took a single cyanide capsule, and died.
Six weeks after Ann’s funeral, Elsie Woodward spoke publicly about the tragedy.
“Well, that’s that; she shot my son and Truman has just murdered her, and so now I suppose we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
Elsie was wrong.
There was still more pain in store for the Woodward family; the books weren’t closed on this case yet. Jimmy never recovered from his mother’s death. The cocaine and heroin, guilt and remorse took its toll on him and less than a year after Ann Woodward died, Jimmy did jump again. This time he was successful in ending his life.
Woody Woodward was the last survivor of his family and seemed to have dodged the terrible curse that had plagued the rest of his family. He latched on to liberal causes and graduated from Harvard. Woody served as a correspondent in Vietnam and negotiated a contract with the New York newspapers for the journalism union.
In 1971, he backed another pair of writers with an idea for media criticism magazine and became publisher of More. The magazine was an influential and critical success, but financially could not support itself.
Before the magazine folded, however, Woody returned to Harvard, got his MBA and turned to politics. He served in the Hugh Carey administration in New York State and with the backing of Mayor Ed Koch, ran unsuccessfully for a city council seat.
He dropped out of the public eye but befriended writer Dominick Dunne, who was working on another fictional account of the Woodward tragedy, the bestseller The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. The men were close enough that when Woody asked Dominick not to use the Woodward name when publicizing the book, Dunne agreed.
Woody married in 1985 as Dunne’s book came out and lived overseas in a life of comfort. But something started to go wrong after about a decade of marriage and in 1996, his wife filed for divorce. The divorce and separation from his child took its toll on Woody who suffered from bipolar disorder and in 1999, after revising his will to leave his $35 million estate entirely to his daughter, the 54-year-old Woodward followed in the steps of his mother and brother, and leapt out the window of his Manhattan co-op.
“He was a wonderful man who had a terrible thing happen to him,” Dunne said. “It’s a sad end to a doomed family.”
Bone, James. “Violent end to a doomed dynasty.” The Times of London. May 5, 1999.
Braudy, Susan. 1992. This Crazy Thing Called Love. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Capote, Truman. “Answered Prayers.” Esquire. November 1975.
Deutsch, Linda. “Dominick Dunne Embroiders a Murder.” The Associated Press. August 23, 1985.
Dorning, Mike. “The Good Life Gone Bad: Murder in High Society?” Chicago Tribune. October 5, 1992.
Dunne, Dominick. 1985. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. New York: Crown Publications.
Geracimos, Ann. “Braudy Tale Reflects High Society’s Lows.” The Washington Times. September 10, 1992.
Jerome, Richard. “Fate’s Captive.” People. May 31, 1999.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “New and Kinder Conclusion for Twice-Told Tale.” The New York Times. August 6, 1992.
Manchutchin, Donna. “High Society Stages Morality Play.” The (Montreal) Gazette. September 26, 1992.
Mansfield, Stephanie. “The Shooting of the Century.” The Washington Post. September 6, 1992.
Noonan, David. “The Last of the Woodwards.” Newsday. May 9, 1999.
Woo, Elaine. “W. Woodward, Scion of Rich Family Plagued by Tragedy.” Los Angeles Times. May 8, 1999.