In May 1921 some of the members who were no longer impressed by the empty hole in the ground on Lexington Avenue formed a committee and asked Mr. Gavin to give an accounting of the International Sporting Club’s finances. He did so suavely and willingly. There were 1,700 members on the list, he said. That was because of his care in selection. Some of these had paid only part of the $500 due on their debentures, but a total of $742,000 had been paid in and quite a lot had been paid out. The price of the building lot had been something like $250,000. There had been a charge of $105,000 for the digging of the hole. He had made an advance of $120,000 for steel, contractors’ fees and architects. And then there had been some expense—about $126,000—for “organization and development.”
There was further inquiry. Borglum became president of the club to succeed Major A. J. Drexel Biddle, and to the end he looked upon Mr. Gavin as a much maligned man.
It was discovered, during what remained of 1921, that Gavin had incorporated two organizations—The International Sporting Club and The Army, Navy, and Civilian Board of Boxing Control—which everybody knew about, and also The International Sporting Club Corporation. The International Sporting Club Corporation was a holding company designed to control the real estate—and the money—of the other two. When the membership investigating committee found out about it, it was in “an unhealthy condition.”
In November 1921, after he had spent another $62,000 for “organization and development,” Mr. Gavin got tired of all the mistrust and bickering. One night he and his attractive wife quietly slipped out of New York. They left no word of explanation or farewell. They left no purse to pay the current bills of the International Sporting Club. The investigators found that the membership had paid in a total of $1,013,478. Before the report was completed they received a nice letter from Gavin saying good-by to everybody, but they found no way to include it in the valuable assets which consisted chiefly of the hole in the ground. They found $149.69 in one bank. In another there was $3.52.
There were those who believed him incompetent to handle money, and those who thought him extremely competent—in his own interest. There were some, like Gutzon, who still believed in him. Nobody sued him; nobody charged him with any crime; no crime was ever proved against him. The money was spent. The members disagreed whether he had given them their money’s worth in excitement and novelty.
Gutzon got words of sympathy from Charles Dana Gibson, Postmaster General Hitchcock, Senator Coleman Dupont, Major General Leonard Wood and others. But nothing came of his efforts to retrieve the Sporting Club. Gavin was gone. The Club was gone. After a while the hole in the ground was filled by another building, the anguished creditors ceased their crying, and presently nothing remained in New York to mark the regime of Gavin except the boxing act. Borglum was never quite sure that it was worth bragging about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
FRIENDS AND HOME
One of the chief errors in the life of Gutzon Borglum was his belief that everybody loved him—or nearly everybody. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t quite that popular. His record for a public career that lasted just about half a century is, of course, the continuous story of a crusader who didn’t mind the noise. He was a positive, stubborn character who could never see why some people didn’t want his ministrations. But it must be admitted that what he wanted to do for human beings was all intended for their own good—and not, particularly, his. He was interested in beauty, and in other people ... and emphatically!
Lester Barlow, the inventor, who knew him well, said that Gutzon’s ambition was to show that he could do anything better than anybody else, from sculpture to tightrope walking. In a way he was right, for Gutzon was a perfectionist with unbounded confidence in himself. If he had gone in for tightrope walking, he would have tried to do it better than it had ever been done before, and, possibly, would have succeeded—possibly not. But the point that Barlow overlooked was that Borglum was always a critic of method and never of results if the work showed progress in technique. If a thing was better done, he never cared much how.
Many of those who knew him well thought he was a man of great humility. He accepted criticism with great calm and respect. He was an ideal father and husband and a pleasant, unexacting friend. That’s what those closest to him say—which is one of the things that makes Gutzon Borglum so difficult to understand.