From
Bachelor of Philosophy to a front for electric trolley inventions,
whaler, deserter, Alaskan gold seeker, railway telegrapher, newsman,
miner, card sharp, car
thief, ‘general crook’ and Sing-Sing prisoner,
to best-selling novelist and
Hollywood scriptwriter:
The Turbulent Life and Times of David Carroll
Henry (1879-1931),
aka ‘Henry Leverage’
‘Henry Leverage’ was
arguably the most prolific and successful pulp fiction writer of the immediate post-World
War I era, yet you will find little about him online or in print – certainly
very little that’s true. That is, until now, as the real story of David Carroll
Henry will herewith be revealed. ‘Henry Leverage’ was not born in London,
England, but in WaKeeny, Trego County, Kansas. He was born in on October 9,
1879, not 1885, and baptised in Philadelphia in 1886. He never stepped foot in England and never defended London
with the Royal Air Force in 1917-18. But he did
spend time in Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and was forever the king
of spinning a good yarn … mostly with the aid of a Corona 3 portable typewriter
and a most lurid imagination.
John C. Henry, second from left, testing the first electric trolley car along Broadway Boulevard, Midtown, Kansas City, in 1884.
David Carroll Henry became
David Carl Henry and eventually just Carl Henry. He came from an industrious if
itinerant family, who moved across the country from Kansas to Colorado,
Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York. His father, Ontario-born John Cummings
Henry (1848-1901), was the inventor of the electric trolley, first tested in
Kansas City in 1883*. His mother, Susie Ann McFadden (1854-), was able to cash
in on her husband’s multiple patents after John Henry died in Manhattan in May 1901,
assigning the rights to the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company of New
Jersey, makers of electric motors, which two years later was taken over by
General Electric. From 1902 the family also used the name David Carl Henry to
assign similar inventions by John C. Henry to GE’s rival, the Magnetic
Transmission Company of Brooklyn, a practise with continued while Carl was in
prison in Sing Sing from 1914-17. In 1903
Carl graduated as a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Colorado in
Boulder, then – or so he claimed – he set
off on the life of a sea-faring adventurer.
When in December 1914 the law
finally caught up with the wayward Carl Henry - by then using the name ‘Henry
Leverage’ - he faced Judge William H. Wadhams (above) in the New York of Court of Petty
Sessions. Henry admitted “I have been a card sharp and a general crook”. That
much was true. But when Henry went on to tell Judge Wadhams, “I can always earn
a good living at my profession, which is that of an electrical engineer”, he
was actually referring to the career of his late father. Carl Henry’s only
qualifications were in philosophy and what he had learned at the Denver Manual
Training High School, not, as he told Wadhams, as a member of the Royal Society
of Engineers in London and the Institute of Electrical Engineers. “After I got
started on the wrong road,” Henry added, “it was hard to get back again.” The
court heard Henry had already spent time in prisons in Washington DC, Baltimore
and Philadelphia, though there is no record of this. Wadhams duly sentenced him
to three years and nine months in Sing Sing, for stealing a car (the charge was
later changed to receiving stolen property).
At Sing Sing (above) the lying went on
unabated. Henry was signed in as Henry Leverage, prisoner 65368, but told
prison officials that his true name was “Charles Henley”. Filling in details in
the Receiving Blotter, he said he was born in London in 1883, and that his
father was born in Leeds and his mother in London. The lengths Henry went to
with this subterfuge were extraordinary: he claimed he had first arrived in
America on the City of Paris on June 15, 1903, docking in New York, and was not
a US citizen. He again claimed he was an electrical engineer. More tellingly,
beside the line “Education”, Henry said he could read and write.
He most certainly could write, and had an
exceptionally vivid imagination. Leverage’s prison stories, which he typed on a
Corona 3 portable he said he’d acquired in 1913, were lauded for their
authenticity. But when it came to stories about his own life, it became
impossible to tell how much was fact and how much was the invention of his own
mind. In an interview with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September 1923, for
example, Leverage said he was born in London in 1880, was educated at Oxford
Street, London, and had arrived in the US in infancy. He said he had run away
from home in Denver as a youngster, worked on the waterfront in San Francisco
before joining the crew of the brigantine whaler the Karluk as a stoker. He got
as far as Herschel Island, and signed on for another season of whaling along
the Siberian coast and in the Bering Strait before deserting at Port Clarence
near Nome and joining the gold seekers in Kotzebue Sound. Leverage then
returned to San Francisco on the Corwin, worked for three years on the Denver
and Rio Grande Railway as a telegrapher, and started the Southern News Bureau
in Walsenburg, Colorado, before being run out of town. For the next seven years
he said he mined and travelled to Mexico, Panama, South America, China, Egypt,
England and France. Then he returned to the US and started writing for a
living. What, apparently, he neglected to tell the Daily Eagle is that he had
spent two years, four months and 28 days in Sing Sing, before being released on
April 17, 1917. The fact that Leverage was in prison when he wrote The Twinkler
was used widely and heavily in publicising the 1916 movie of the story, but
within seven years this had apparently been forgotten.
It is true that Leverage did
register for a World War I call-up - calling himself a patents engineer - two
months before the end of the war, but he never served. In a publicity letter
for the Corona Typewriter Company, written 1924, Leverage claimed “I took [the
typewriter] to England during the war and had it up in one of the Royal Air
Planes used in defence of London.” This was just another fanciful imagining.
Leverage was released 17 months
before famed New York newspaper editor Charles E. Chapin was incarcerated at Sing
Sing for putting his wife out of her misery, and during his term behind bars
Leverage would have been one of the most literate men either side of Sing Sing’s
cell bars. Under the enlightened wardenship of radical prison reformer Thomas
Mott Osborne (above), whose tenure at Sing Sing began 10 days before Leverage arrived
there, Leverage was given the post of editor of the prison's newspaper, the
Star of Hope. The appointment would also have had a lot to do with Leverage’s
possession of a portable typewriter. Leverage wrote an article, “Two Years of
Prison Reform” as a tribute to Osborne and his work at Sing Sing.
Masthead of the Star of Hope, edited by Henry Leverage while he was in Sing Sing. The newspaper was founded in April 1899 by forger Henry Kirke White, author of Life in Sing Sing. The masthead was designed by forger Francis Quigley.
When
long-time pulp magazine editor and publisher Harold Brainerd Hersey (below) first visited
Leverage in Sing Sing, he found the prisoner surrounded by pictures of Joseph
Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and other well-travelled and well-known authors on the
walls of his cell. Leverage had a small library on a shelf over a tiny table,
on which sat the Corona 3. “He was
turning out thousands of words a week [Leverage later claimed he could write up
to 10,000 words a day]. Like so many experts, he seldom revised a page once it
left his typewriter … Nervous, wiry, energetic, with eyes sunk deep in his head
and a habit of restlessly moving his legs and arms as he talked, he soon
convinced me he was a serious author … I
never did ask him what had gone awry with his life. He told me when we first
met that it was distinctly the wrong thing to interrogate a prisoner concerning
his past .. I suspected that Henry Leverage had had a most exciting career. Now
and again he let fall hints about experiences in China and Europe, anecdotes of
sailing before the mast and adventures in the Far West.”
After his release, Leverage
enjoyed most of the last 13 years and 10 months of his life as a celebrity, almost
constantly in the newspaper gossip columns spotlight. It would seem, however,
that for the money he earned from his writing, it was a case of easy come, easy
go. In his 1924 letter to the Corona
Typewriter Company, Leverage said he had been paid $100,000 in cash for the
movie rights for his major success, Whispering Wires, “with much more in
royalties to come.” All up, he said he had made a profit of $250,000 from seven
million “sold words” typed on his Corona over a period of 11 years – sometimes writing
for 36 hours at a stretch. That breaks down to an average of 1750 words a day. In
an article in the Star of Hope, he had advised fellow prisoners that they, too,
could expect to be paid at least $500 for a published short story. On July 31,
1920, Leverage married May Alice Collins (1889-, not the actress of the same name) of Middletown, New York, and at the
end of the decade the couple moved to Hollywood – ironically, renting a house
right across North Cahuenga Boulevard from the Los Angeles Police Department.
The truth about the Whispering
Wires deal was a little more complicated than Leverage had cared to admit in
print. In February 1919 Leverage was struggling financially and was offered
just $1500 for the movie rights to his 1918 novel. Leverage instructed his
agent, Laura D. Wilck, to accept the offer, but on her way to doing so, Wilck met
producer-director George Broadhurst, who counter-offered with $500 down with an
option on the rights. The option was not
taken up and for more than four years Leverage was left with just the $500, until
screenwriter Kate L. McLaurin offered to dramatise the book on a 50-50 basis. The
rights were immediately picked up by producer Lee Shubert and Whispering Wires
was suddenly valued in the millions. Released in 1926, it was still screening two
years later, when succeeded by the stage play version.
Notwithstanding the undoubtedly
screen success of Whispering Wires, Henry and May Leverage’s sojourn in California
was short and by the end of 1930 they had returned to May’s home town of Middletown.
Henry died in the Druskin Hospital, West 123rd Street, New York, on February
24, 1931, after a 10-day illness. He was aged just 51.
The Twinkler and Whispering
Wires remain Leverage’s major legacies, along with his 1925 “Flynn's Dictionary
of the Underworld”. But between 1918 and a year after his death, Leverage had
had – under that name, his real name of Carl Henry and another pseudonym,
Winfield Byrd – a staggering 114 stories published in various pulp magazines, a
rate of more than eight a year. And that’s on top of 15 novels. But, then,
fiction came easy to ‘Henry Leverage’. In some ways it could be said his whole
life was built around fiction.
