Ellen Walsh was born in England in 1838, the daughter of an Irish peddler who had fled the poverty of Ireland during the great potato famine. The family crossed the Atlantic in the early 1850s, settling first in Boston before scattering across the United States. But for Ellen, being Irish in mid-century America was a burden. Anti-Irish sentiment ran deep, with signs reading “No blacks, no Jews, no Irish” hanging in establishments across the country.
So Ellen erased her past. She renamed herself Ida Mayfield and invented a new identity, claiming she came from Louisiana and that her father had been a sugar plantation owner. It was a fiction she would maintain for the rest of her life. In New York, Ida turned her attention to Benjamin Wood, the editor of the New York Daily News.
The paper had been bought by Benjamin’s brother Fernando, a wealthy businessman who served as mayor of New York, and its editorial line was fiercely pro-slavery and supportive of southern secession. Despite the fact that Wood was married, Ida wrote to him unsolicited, and the two began a relationship. When Wood’s wife died in 1867, they married, and Ida was catapulted to the heights of New York society. She mixed with presidents and princes, all while maintaining the elaborate fiction of her Southern origins.
The couple even claimed that Ida’s younger sister Emma was actually their daughter, a deception designed to further bury Ida’s Irish past. Benjamin Wood died in 1900, leaving Ida a fortune of roughly two million dollars, the equivalent of over seventy-five million today. She briefly took over the newspaper before selling it in 1901 and then vanished from public life. Then, in 1907, in the midst of the banking panic that shook American banking, Ida withdrew about a million dollars, roughly forty percent of her wealth, and, with her sister Mary and her alleged daughter Emma, rented rooms 551 and 552 at the Herald Square Hotel.
They stayed there for a quarter of a century. They refused entry to cleaning staff, receiving deliveries only at the door, and gradually faded entirely from memory as the hotel staff left the wealthy recluses to themselves. Emma died in 1928. In May 1931, when Mary fell ill, the elderly Ida called for help too late, and doctors found Mary dead on a couch in the squalid, hoarded suite.
Ida herself was no longer lucid enough to explain their decision and was declared psychologically incompetent. The money she had withdrawn in 1907 was found locked away in forgotten trunks. She died in March 1932 at the age of ninety-four from bronchial pneumonia, having spent her final years hiding from the society she had once conquered. Because Ida left no will, over a thousand people came forward to claim her fortune, most believing her fabricated story of Louisiana roots.
After years of investigation, a court in 1939 divided her estate among ten first cousins, her true heirs, finally undoing a lifetime of lies. A generation later, Gladys Deacon was born in Paris in 1881 into a family that would be shattered by violence. Her father, Edward Deacon, came from a distinguished Boston family; her mother, Florence, was the daughter of a celebrated American naval commander. The marriage was unhappy, and in 1892, Edward shot and killed his wife’s lover in a hotel room on the French Riviera.
Money and influence reduced the murder charge to manslaughter, and he served just one year before being pardoned. Gladys was briefly sent to a convent, from which her mother kidnapped her weeks later, and then she was sent back to America to live with her father in New England. His mental health collapsed, and he was committed to an asylum, where he died in 1901, leaving Gladys and her siblings a sizable inheritance. By then, Gladys had grown into one of the great beauties of the Belle Époque, painted by celebrated artists and admired by the writer Marcel Proust.
In 1897, at just sixteen, she was invited to Blenheim Palace, where she began an affair with the Duke of Marlborough, whose marriage to the American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt was unhappy. The relationship continued for over two decades until the Duke divorced and finally married Gladys in 1921. But her life was already marked by a devastating mistake. In 1903, at twenty-two, she had undergone one of the earliest cosmetic surgeries, injections of paraffin into her jawline, which failed and left her permanently disfigured by lumps of hardened wax.
The marriage did not bring her happiness. Gladys developed serious mental health problems, compounded by the disfigurement and the couple’s inability to have children. She insisted on having large paintings of her eyes hung over the palace doorways, became obsessed with breeding spaniels, and kept a revolver by her bedside. At one dinner party, she placed the gun on the table in front of the guests, telling them she might just shoot the Duke.
The Duke finally told her to leave in 1933, and died before the divorce was finalized the following year. Gladys became increasingly reclusive and erratic, tipping a bucket of water over a journalist, threatening to shoot local children who stole apples from her orchard, and ringing strangers in the middle of the night. In 1962, she was committed to St. Andrew’s Psychiatric Hospital, where she remained until her death in 1977 at the age of ninety-six.
Today, the painted eyes still peer down from above the doorways at Blenheim Palace. Lucia Joyce was born in Trieste in 1907, the daughter of James Joyce, the Irish writer then on the edge of literary fame, and Nora Barnacle, the woman he would not marry until 1931. The family moved constantly across Europe, and Lucia grew up in an itinerant household strained by insecurity, moving to Paris in 1920 as Joyce became one of the most prominent literary figures in Europe. Lucia grew up surrounded by Picasso, Hemingway and Stravinsky, and she found her own path as a dancer.
By 1928, she was performing in Paris, Vienna and Berlin; in 1929, she was runner-up at the first international festival of dance in Paris. One critic wrote that James Joyce might yet be known as his daughter’s father. Then she suddenly quit dancing, telling friends she was not physically strong enough to continue. Around the same time, her brief relationship with the writer Samuel Beckett, briefly her father’s secretary, ended when Beckett told her he was more interested in her father and his writing.
The combined losses brought a dramatic decline in her mental health. She suffered violent outbursts, and was treated at a psychiatric clinic in Zurich by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In 1935, after she lit a fire in a relative’s living room, tried to unbutton the trousers of male visitors, and disappeared into Dublin to sleep in doorways for nearly a week, her parents committed her to an asylum outside Paris. Her father and brother visited her on Sundays, but there is no record that her mother ever saw her again.
After her father’s death in 1941, Lucia was eventually transferred to St. Andrew’s Hospital in England in 1951, where Samuel Beckett paid for her care. She died in 1982, the last surviving member of her immediate family. After her death, her nephew destroyed most of her writing, including her correspondence with her father.
Her medical records were burned, and Jung’s notes were destroyed. The family seemed determined to erase any trace of her existence. Rosemary Kennedy was born in 1918, the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. The family was already one of the most significant political and business dynasties in New England.
From a young age, she was placed in schools for the intellectually disabled, though her father’s ambitions were focused on his sons. In 1938, Joseph Kennedy became the American ambassador to Britain, and Rosemary flourished, being presented at court. But when the family returned to America in 1940, she deteriorated, becoming irritable, difficult, and prone to lashing out. Her father saw her as a liability who could bring shame to the family.
In November 1941, without consulting his wife, Joseph Kennedy sent Rosemary to have a lobotomy. The procedure, still experimental and believed by many to be a miracle cure for psychological disturbances, was carried out by Drs. Walter Freeman and James Watts at George Washington University. The surgery severed brain tissue, and the result was catastrophic.
Rosemary was left brain damaged with the mental capacity of an infant, unable to walk unaided or speak intelligibly. Instead of keeping her close, Joseph institutionalized her in New York, then at a school in Wisconsin, where a private cottage was built for her care, and she became the family’s dark secret. Her siblings did not visit her through the 1940s and 1950s, and her absence from politics was explained away as disinterest. It was only after their father’s stroke in 1961 that the family learned what had happened.
As surviving siblings reestablished contact in the following decades, Rosemary remained an inspiration for her sister Eunice’s founding of the Special Olympics. She died in 2005 at the age of eighty-six. Kathleen Kennedy, born in 1920, was the flamboyant Kennedy daughter, nicknamed Kick by her family. When her father was appointed ambassador to Britain in 1938, she was introduced into London society, where the press dubbed her the debutante of 1938.
When the Second World War broke out, the family returned to America, and Kathleen, rejecting her father’s isolationism, joined the Red Cross and returned to Britain in 1943. There she reconnected with William Cavendish, the Marquis of Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire. They married in May 1944 in a registry office, after Kathleen had drifted away from the Catholic faith of her family, and only her brother Joseph attended. The marriage lasted four months.
William was killed by a sniper in Belgium in September 1944. Her brother Joseph had been killed just weeks earlier in a flying accident over England. Kathleen remarried, or came to be with Peter Fitzwilliam, an aristocrat who was still married. If she could gain her family’s approval, he agreed to leave his wife.
In May 1948, they flew from Paris to the French Riviera to meet her father. The plane crashed in a storm near the Rhône valley, killing everyone on board. Only her father represented the Kennedys at her funeral. Kathleen was buried in her late husband’s family plot at Chatsworth.
She was the first of the tragedies that became known as the Kennedy curse, which would claim her brother John in 1963 and Robert in 1968, and continue to haunt the family for decades.