The True Story of Clara Parnin
by Gary Hardcastle

Late on the night of Sunday, February 18th, 1912, Clara Parnin, age 20, left her family a note on the table in their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “Dear Mother and All the Rest,” it read,

I could not bear to say good-bye, but am happy. Don’t be worried, for I will drop you a letter when I reach my place.... I will send you some money this week, and I have some coming over to the factory on Sunday. I could never have helped you very much here, so I am doing it for the best. I hope you won’t be angry with me.... I will be home in about three or four weeks. I told you I was going, but I did not tell you when, but I could not say good-bye.... So don’t worry, I will send you money. Good-bye, with love to all. Clara

Then she walked a dozen blocks to the railway station and boarded an overnight train to Madison, Wisconsin, by way of Chicago.

Clara was bound for Madison’s Majestic theater, and for Leonard, a piano player she’d met just a few days earlier in Fort Wayne. Leonard and his partner Lou were making their way in vaudeville. Lou sang. Their act, From Grand Opera to Ragtime, was one of thousands touring the sixteen hundred vaudeville theaters across the United States and Canada in 1912. Vaudeville had its stars, but Leonard and Lou were strictly small-time. Seats at Fort Wayne’s Temple theater, where the pair had played a matinee and two evening shows for six days straight, were cheap—ten cents for the balcony, and a quarter for the main floor. The act wasn’t bad, though, and Clara thought Leonard’s piano playing was charming. He played effortlessly, his left hand laying down a rhythm while the index finger of his right hand tapped out melodies. He looked up to smile at the audience, and, more than once, Clara thought, at her. Clara played piano too. Just a few months earlier, in fact, she’d gone into considerable debt to purchase the upright that now sat in the family living room.

At some point they struck up a conversation. Leonard was charming off-stage as well, it turned out. He was only a few years older than Clara, but he’d grown up in New York City and had seen far more of the world. Six months earlier he’d been working in Pittsburgh as a song-plugger, someone who pitched new songs to music publishers by playing and singing the songs to them right in their offices. He’d even had two of his own compositions published, and the Edison company had just released a wax cylinder recording of the second tune, sung by the well-known tenor Walter van Brunt. It was called “Mandy, Come Out In The Pale Moonlight.” Clara, in contrast, had worked full-time since she’d left school at sixteen, and never been far from Fort Wayne.

Clara told Leonard about her new piano, and about how money was tight. Leonard told her there was money to be made in vaudeville, even small-time vaudeville, and even if you were “on a route” (what the vaudevillians called it when they went from theater to theater) for just a month. Then—rather suddenly, it seemed to Clara—they were talking about her joining their act, about her actually going on a route with Leonard and Lou. She might play piano, or sing, or both; Leonard had lots of ideas. It wouldn’t be permanent, of course, but just for a month or so, by which time she could make the money the family needed. Which, Leonard assured her, she would.

He made it all sound easy. And the idea of performing, on stage, before an actual audience? That thrilled Clara a bit, if she was honest. She’d need at least one evening gown to perform in (maybe two?) and, well, who knew where it might lead? Vaudeville stars like Eva Tanguay and Belle Baker had come from backgrounds more humble than Clara’s, and according to the Fort Wayne Daily News Eva Tanguay now earned $3,000 a week. That was more than Clara made at Fort Wayne’s Bass Foundry and Machine Company in a whole year.

So Clara brought Leonard home, to her house, to meet her family. He was there that very Sunday morning, in fact, before he and Lou had to catch the train to Wisconsin for their next booking. If her parents and her older brother Fred met Leonard, Clara had reasoned, they’d love him, and surely warm to her plan. And they did love him, of course. He was sweet, and funny, and when he played piano—Clara’s piano—for them all, Maurice and Carrie, Clara’s two siblings still in grammar school, were entranced.

But when she told her family of her plan, later that afternoon, after Leonard left, there was no delight at all. They didn’t believe Clara about the money to be made, for starters, and when she told them she’d already quit her job, they were shocked. They knew she’d almost certainly be hired back (the factories in Fort Wayne were always hiring, after all), but that didn’t seem to make any difference. The worst part, the part that hurt the most, was that they hardly listened to her before they dismissed the whole idea.

“I told you I was going,” she’d written.

And then there was the matter of Carl, her fiancé, to whom she was engaged, at least according to her parents. In her note she’d been blunt: “Carl does not care for me any more.” Below that, however, she’d added, as an afterthought, “If Carl comes over write me what he has to say.” Clara would return to Fort Wayne in three or four weeks, after all, and maybe then things would be different. In the meantime, she assured her family, she would “be treated very nice” by Leonard.

Clara arrived at the Majestic theater in Madison, Wisconsin, in time for the 3:00 matinee, and sat in a box seat perched nearly over the theater’s small stage. Clara appeared to enjoy the show, so it was likely only after the matinee that she discovered the terrible mistake she had made. Leonard was surprised indeed to see Clara, but far from happy. It quickly became clear that all his talk—about joining the act, going on a route, making money—was just talk, and nothing more. He made it clear that Clara would not be joining the act. She would not be going “on a route,” and she would not be making any money or sending any to her family. She was completely humiliated.

Out of pride, or because she didn’t know what else to do, Clara returned to the Majestic that evening for the 7:30 show, sitting in the very same seat so Leonard wouldn’t miss her. “Persons in the audience,” the Wisconsin State Journal would report the next day, “noticed her agitated manner.”

After the 7:30 show Leonard refused to see her, so Clara crossed the street to the Capital House hotel. The Capital House was where the vaudevillians stayed, and earlier that day she’d secured her own room there by presenting herself as a performer, mentioning Leonard for good measure. As Clara entered the Capital House lobby, livid at Leonard’s rejection and at her own foolishness, she encountered Fred, her older brother, along with her fiance, Carl. Clara’s family had found her note that morning and promptly tracked Leonard to Madison. Then they alerted both the Majestic Theater and the Capitol House in Madison, possibly leaving the impression that Clara had been abducted. Fred and Carl left for Madison shortly after, to retrieve Clara and deliver vengeance upon Leonard. And now here they were, in the lobby of the Capital House.

The scene that followed was stormy. Clara informed Fred and Carl, and anyone else in earshot, that she would not be going back to Fort Wayne. Not now, and not ever. Then she went up to her room.

Having located Clara, if not quite retrieved her, Fred and Carl crossed the street to the theater in search of Leonard. They arrived as the 9:00 show began, bought tickets, and took seats in the front row, glaring at Leonard for the fifteen minutes he and Lou were on stage. Afterwards, Fred and Carl waited for Leonard in the theater lobby, giving him time to escape through the stage door. They waited a half-hour before giving up and returning to the Capital House.

Meanwhile, alone in her room, Clara grappled with it all. She had run off from Fort Wayne, leaving her job and her family to pursue a scheme that had fallen apart before it even began. Even worse, the whole thing had the potential to end up in any of Fort Wayne’s several newspapers, which loved stories of young women led astray and were not above embellishing these stories as needed to attract readers. Fred had mentioned that a reporter from The Fort Wayne Daily News had already interviewed their parents.

Humiliated, faced with the prospect of further angering and embarrassing her family, having no other options, and with her brother and fiancé sure to return, Clara went down to the Capitol House lobby and waited for Fred and Carl. When the pair arrived she apologized, and agreed to return with them to Fort Wayne. Fred and Carl exhausted a more few hours searching for the increasingly slippery Leonard before departing for Fort Wayne by train with Clara Tuesday morning. Leonard and Clara never saw each other again.

When she arrived in Fort Wayne Tuesday afternoon, Clara saw the newspaper story she’d feared. It had appeared just twenty-four hours earlier, on the front page of The Fort Wayne Daily News. ‘SHE ELOPED WITH ACTOR’, the headline read. It began,

Although she was to have been married next week to Carl Waltemath, Clara M. Parnin, aged nineteen years, of 2001 Force Street, eloped last night with Actor Marx, who last week appeared in a piano act at the Temple theater.

She hadn’t eloped with Leonard, of course (quite the opposite, Clara thought). That idea came from her mother, no doubt, as did the notion that Clara was going to marry Carl next week. She had said yes to Carl’s proposal, it was true, but that was some time ago, and the engagement had not been going smoothly at all. Carl’s parents objected on account of his age, for one thing (Carl had just turned eighteen), and Carl himself had a bit of a wild streak, as Clara was learning. They hadn’t purchased a license yet, or set a date. The notion that they were to be married next week was, well, ridiculous. The paper got Clara’s age wrong as well (she was twenty), and reported that Leonard “seemed to be about thirty-five.” That had to be her mother again. Leonard was in fact twenty-four.

The second-to-last paragraph really took the cake, though. It read:

The mother of the girl stated to the police today that the child must have been under hypnotic influence of the actor at the time of the elopement. She went to the vaudeville very rarely and had never shown any bad tendencies. That the girl was hypnotized is the only solution the mother can give.

Hypnotic influence of the actor? Did her mother really believe that? Or did she just make it up to save face with their friends and neighbors? Either way, Clara’s blood boiled. Had they even read the note she left, or listened to her explanations? The article mentioned the note, but there was nothing about the money, or her plan, or Leonard’s empty promises. Perhaps, though, that was just as well. She’d not told Fred or Carl about the humiliation she’d suffered at Leonard’s hands, and she didn’t see the need to tell anyone else either. She’d already decided to avoid everyone in Fort Wayne, including her family, for as long as possible.

Clara barely digested the first story when the second appeared, in Tuesday afternoon’s Daily News. “PARNIN GIRL RETURNING” read the headline, with “Leaves Her Actor Affinity When Fiance Follows Her” just below it. Somehow they’d learned what had happened in Madison—the byline read ‘Special to the News’ from Madison, Wisconsin—although they had not learned, thank goodness, of how Leonard had rejected her. The article repeated the fiction of her “elopement,” except now it said Clara was eighteen, and that she and Leonard had been registered at the hotel “as man and wife.” On the other hand, the paper had apparently (and thankfully) given up on the bit about Leonard hypnotizing her. It described Fred and Carl’s arrival at the hotel, the terrible scene she’d made in the lobby, the pair's attempts to find Leonard after that, her apology, and, finally, their return to Fort Wayne that very afternoon. The paper had also interviewed Leonard, whose version of the whole affair was predictably, and infuriatingly, self-serving. According to Leonard, Clara pursued him—passing him notes, coming to all his performances, and taking him to meet her family. Leonard said that when he left Fort Wayne for Madison, Clara “begged to be taken along.” The nerve! A little further down the reporter had written that in Fort Wayne Leonard “proved to be quite a devil among the girls and is said to have boasted to some local acquaintances of his conquests. He told several men at his hotel that he intended taking Miss Parnin with him and employing her in his act.”

There was a disconcerting paragraph about the harm she’d done to her family’s reputation (the Parnins are “highly estimable people,” the writer offered), but in place of yesterday’s absurd hypnotism story was something closer to the truth. The article mentioned the money Clara had intended to send home after a few weeks, and it noted that “her mother believes she intends it to be applied to making payments on a piano she bought a couple of months ago.” Then, at the very end, as if it had been included only to fill space, was her note, the one she’d written and left for her family late Sunday night. The newspaper had reprinted it in its entirety, never mind that it contradicted almost everything else they had published about her supposed infatuation and elopement. Clara read again the words she’d written just two days before.

Dear Mother and All the Rest:
I could not bear to say good-bye, but am happy. Don’t be worried, for I will drop you a letter when I reach my place. I hate to do this, but Carl does not care for me any more. I will send you some money this week, and I have some coming over to the factory on Sunday. I never could have helped you very much here, so I am doing it for the best. I hope you won’t be angry at me. I will drop you a letter tomorrow and let you know how everything is. If Carl comes over write me what he has to say. I will be home in about three or four weeks. I told you I was going, but I did not tell you when, but I could not say good-bye. I know I will be treated very nice by Mr. Marx. So don’t worry, I will send you money. Good-bye, with love to all.
Clara

When reporters came to the door Tuesday afternoon Clara and her family refused them. Carl, on the other hand, apparently had no qualms about talking to the newspapers. On Tuesday he told The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette that he would wed Clara “within a few days,” which the newspaper duly reported on Wednesday under the headline “WILL FORGET PAST AND WED MISS PARNIN.” The Fort Wayne Daily News ran a similar piece the same day, noting that “Waltemath has forgiven the girl and she has repented.” But the story was losing steam. On Thursday the Daily News published a picture of Leonard on p. 6, the same picture that had hung in the lobby of the theater in Fort Wayne when Leonard and Lou played there. Above the image was Leonard’s name, and below it the caption, “The Vaudeville Actor Who Eloped With Miss Parnin.” On Friday there was nothing about the affair in the papers, nor in the days after. Clara returned to work, this time as an operator at the Economy Glove Company in Fort Wayne.

Clara Parnin would spend the rest of her life in and around Fort Wayne, Indiana. She did not marry Carl Waltemath in the weeks after her return from Madison. Instead she continued to live with her family and work in Fort Wayne’s busy factories. Four years after the episode with Leonard, in June of 1916, she married Brice Metcalf. Brice’s father was a prominent Fort Wayne physician who had died when Brice was five, and when Brice’s mother passed away a year later Brice and an older sister were taken in by their uncle and his wife, who had a small farm a few miles north of Fort Wayne. In 1910, when he was twenty-one, Brice began working as a fireman for the Pennsylvania Railroad, tending the boilers and feeding coal to the furnaces of the steam locomotives that criss-crossed the eastern United States. He’d been a fireman for seven years, and married to Clara for just ten months, when a trough plug blew on a boiler he was tending early one morning in Sandusky, Ohio. Brice was blasted with steam “from his knees upward to the top of his head,” according to The Fort Wayne Sentinel. His “flesh,” the paper added, “was literally cooked.” He died that afternoon at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Fort Wayne, his sister and Clara by his side. The Sentinel wrote that “the young man possessed an admirable type of character and good fellowship and made countless number of friends wherever he went.”

A year later, in the summer of 1918, Clara did marry Carl Waltemath. She was twenty-seven now; he was twenty-four, and the co-owner of Faultless Dry Cleaners in Fort Wayne. The marriage was rocky. The summer after they were married, the Fort Wayne News and Sentinel reported that a local woman (“Anna Jones, colored”) “had been found in a dry cleaning establishment on East Creighton Avenue at 3 o’clock this morning in company with Carl Waltemath... and James Kallenbach.” The “empty and partially empty bottles, as well as the odor of liquor on their breaths,” the paper went on, “told a story of riotous revelry.” The three were arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, and fined—“Waltemath and Kallenbach each $10 and costs, and the negress $5 and costs.” “While en route to the station,” the newspaper added, “Waltemath made a vain plea to have the electric light in the patrol wagon turned off, so that nobody could see him.” Two months later Clara filed for divorce, telling the Court that Carl “was in the habit of getting drunk once or twice a week and that while intoxicated he would abuse her.” When the divorce was granted three weeks later, Clara was awarded ownership of a piano and a Victrola, as well as the restoration of her maiden name; everything else the court gave to Carl. Clara came back once again to live with her parents and siblings (and their growing families) in a large new home on Fort Wayne’s north side. She returned to work at Economy Glove.

A little over two years later, in February of 1922, Clara married Carl a second time. They were married seventeen months when Carl overturned his brand new Velie coupe on the farm roads north of Fort Wayne. Neither Carl nor the two women riding with him were injured, but when the police arrived they discovered a case of Cincinnati Cream Ale and a half jug of moonshine in the car, broken bottles on the road, and a very inebriated Carl. He was charged with transporting liquor (this was during prohibition) and operating an automobile while intoxicated. The Fort Worth Journal-Gazette reported that when the two women in the car learned that Carl was married, they expressed sympathy for his wife. He was found guilty on both counts, fined a hundred dollars, and sentenced to six-months in the notorious Indiana State Penal Farm in Greencastle. Clara ran the dry cleaning business while Carl was incarcerated, and when he was released they resettled in Rome City, twenty miles northwest, and opened a new dry cleaning business. Their years in Rome City were relatively quiet, until early 1929 when Carl began to suffer the paralysis characteristic of late-stage syphilis. He was moved to the National Sanitarium in Marion, Indiana, where he died a year later, his wife Clara and his mother by his side.1 Carl was thirty-six, and Clara was now thirty-nine.

After Carl died, Clara stayed in Rome City, though there is little record of her life there. In 1932 she advertised the sale of their business, and in 1937 she married William Berning. William, age fifty-three, had lost his wife the year before. By 1940 Clara and William owned and operated a small tavern in Rome City. Not long after they relocated to Farmington, Michigan, on the outskirts of Detroit, to manage a tavern there. Then, in the summer of 1944, recently diagnosed with stomach cancer, William went out to their barn, raised a pistol to his left temple, and took his life. Two decades earlier his twenty-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Mosell, took her own life in the same manner after receiving a similar diagnosis.

Clara, now fifty-six, returned to Fort Wayne in 1947. She worked as a housekeeper until she married Ernest Bultemeyer, a Fort Wayne plumber, in 1948. Like William Berning, Ernest was widowed with adult children from his previous marriage. For the next thirteen years Clara and Ernest lived a quiet life in a comfortable home in Fort Wayne. Clara kept house while Ernest worked for the General Electric Company. Ernest retired in 1955, and in 1961 he passed away as a result of a heart attack. He was seventy-two. Four years later, in 1964, Clara succumbed to heart failure in Fort Wayne. She was seventy-four years old. Clara is buried next to Ernest in Fort Wayne’s Greenlaw Memorial Park, just a few miles from the home she left the night she departed for Madison, Wisconsin, to join Leonard and Lou in vaudeville.

After they finished their stint at the Majestic in Madison, Leonard and Lou embarked for Galesburg, Illinois, where they played the remainder of the week. Over the next three months the team had irregular bookings in Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, and Michigan before Leonard’s shenanigans led to their split late in May. Leonard found himself a new partner and began working stages as half of “The Ragtime Kids,” until the summer of 1912, when he joined his three brothers in a modestly successful touring company managed by their mother. She was overjoyed to have four of her five sons in one act. The act was a thirty-minute “miniature musical comedy,” or “tabloid” (“tab” for short), known as Mr. Green’s Reception. It was a sequel of sorts to their earlier hit, Fun in Hi Skool, which was itself lifted from the blockbuster 1908 Gus Edward tab, School Boys and Girls. Then, in 1914, at a backstage poker game at the Gaiety theater in Galesburg, so the story goes, a fellow vaudevillian gave the brothers the nicknames by which they would come to be known for the rest of their lives. Arthur, who played a harp in the act, was dubbed ‘Harpo’. Milton’s soft-soled shoes earned him the name ‘Gummo’. Julius, the most serious and worry-prone of the four, became ‘Groucho’. And Leonard, whose affinity for young women was already legendary among those who knew him, was christened ‘Chicko’ (soon, ‘Chico’). Thus were born the Marx Brothers. In the next two decades they would become the most famous comedy team in the world.

While Clara Parnin was living her life in and around Fort Wayne, Leonard would return frequently. He returned to the Temple theater with his three brothers less than a year after he’d met Clara, and then again in 1914 when the troupe presented both Mr. Green’s Reception and Fun in Hi Skool. They brought down the house with every performance, according to The Fort Wayne Sentinel. By now, Leonard was managing the act. In 1918 they brought their new show, Home Again, to Fort Wayne’s larger and more prestigious Palace theater. It was a “breezy, lightsome farce,” the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette observed, adding that the Marx Brothers were “prime favorites with Fort Wayne audiences.” At the time Clara’s first husband, Brice Metcalf, had been dead for twelve months, and Clara was about to embark on the first of her two marriages to Carl Waltemath.

The Marx Brothers got their big break in 1924, not in vaudeville, where they had persevered for decades, but on Broadway, at the Casino theater on Broadway and 39th, in a show called I’ll Say She Is. For the next six years Leonard’s visits to Fort Wayne would be primarily in print. The writer O. O. McIntyre was no fan (“they... bore me stiff”), but in the second half of the 1920s he mentioned the Marx Brothers regularly in “New York Day By Day,” his daily column of wry observations of city life syndicated in over five hundred newspapers, including the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

By the end of the decade, the Marx Brothers would bring their latest Broadway hit, The Cocoanuts, to hundreds of theaters across America simultaneously, in the form of a “talking picture,” a movie. The Cocoanuts, the first Marx Brothers movie, opened at the Rialto theater in Fort Wayne on February 15, 1930, to tremendous fanfare. It was held over twice. The movie featured a scene that would become a beloved staple of Marx Brothers films, in which Leonard charms his audience by playing the piano, “shooting” the keys as he had done back in his days with Lou Shean. Years later, Groucho would remember that “when Chico played the piano... the dames would... fall down.... He had an enormous amount of charm for women.” While The Cocoanuts was packing them in at the Rialto in Fort Wayne, Clara was visiting her husband Carl in the National Sanatorium, where he was nearing death.

Through the 1930s the Marx Brothers’ star would only rise. Ten subsequent Marx Brothers films, among them a few comedic masterpieces, played in theaters around the world and in Fort Wayne, often for weeks on end. Then there were the weekly radio shows, the magazine interviews and profiles, and the newspaper and newsreel coverage of their antics and adventures. When the brothers retired from films in 1941 (they were by this point in their early fifties) Leonard kept working. In 1942 he brought the Chico Marx Orchestra to the Palace in Fort Wayne, and the following year he returned with The Chico Marx Hollywood Cavalcade. There is no way to know, of course, if Clara attended any of these live appearances, saw any of the movies, listened to Leonard on the radio, or read about him in any of the papers; or, if she did, whether she thought, for even a moment, of what might have happened, of how her life could have been different, if Leonard had believed in her, if he hadn’t betrayed her.

What Clara didn’t know, and what few people outside of show business at the time would have known, was that the drama and chaos of Clara’s brief encounter with Leonard recurred with hundreds, if not thousands, of women over the course of Leonard’s life, and that by the time the The Chico Marx Hollywood Cavalcade rolled into Fort Wayne, Leonard had been the victim of three decades of his own self-destructive womanizing and gambling. He continued to work only because he needed the money. When Leonard died from arteriosclerosis in 1961, his savings were negligible; the obituary in the Fort Wayne Sentinel reported that he was “the least successful [of the brothers] financially” and was “always a cause of concern to [his] family.” Harpo’s wife Susan, who knew Leonard for two decades, said that “[h]e liked to gamble and didn’t care what it cost and what it would take away from his family.... The people who loved him were the ones who never knew him well.” It’s worth noting that Leonard’s daughter Maxine, to whom he was close, judged him far more sympathetically.

In the months that I was learning all of this about Clara Parnin, and telling my friends and family about her, I would often say that, though a lot of tragic things happened to Clara, her life was not a tragedy. I believe this still, and I believe it not just because Clara’s last seventeen or so years were quiet and, apparently, happy, but because in her first fifty-six years, when she endured so much, she persevered.

And, as I see her, she didn’t merely persevere. She moved forward, as best she was able, picking up the pieces, going back to work, remarrying, trying again, moving on. She did this out of necessity, of course—let there be no doubt about that—but not just out of necessity. There’s hope at work, the stubborn belief that there is something better out there, ready to be taken by anyone who believes in it and who is brave enough to reach for it. To catch that midnight train to Madison, say, or bet that there is something worth saving in Carl Waltemath. Ask anyone who grew up in the American Midwest: a bit of recalcitrant hope can be a very powerful thing.

But, in all honesty, I don’t know what the truth is, what went on in Clara’s head over her long and frequently tumultuous life. No one who knew Clara is alive today, and nothing she wrote remains, save a brief letter that she left her family late on a Sunday night in 1912. So maybe it’s less a matter of the truth, of what the facts are, and more a matter of how I choose to see her, of how I want to think of her. And I do know how I want to think of Clara Parnin. I want to think of her as she was not in those moments just after the world trampled her plans and dreams, but in the times just before, when she was forming those dreams. Not in the Majestic theater in Madison, Wisconsin, but in her parent’s parlor in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Leonard Marx, not yet Chico, is playing for Clara and her family the song he’d composed just a few months earlier.

Underneath your window I am waiting
Mandy, my dear.
Can’t you hear the birdies are a-singing
When you are near?

See the moon shines down in all its splendor,
Come let us go.
Through the woodlands hand-in-hand together
Singing soft and low.

Mandy, can’t you hear me gently calling?
Mandy, while the moonbeams are a-falling?
Come out, won’t you honeydew?
Be my little Mandy and I’ll be your handy-Andy, oh you.

Mandy, while the stars are brightly shining,
For you, don’t you know my heart is pining?
Come out, Mandy,
Come out in the pale moonlight.