A flawed marriage takes center stage

The story so far ...

Smith Reynolds was fatally shot at his Reynolda estate. A coroner's inquest has begun meeting to try to determine whether his death was a suicide.

It was the third and final day of the coroner's inquest, and Libby Holman was again to testify about what she knew of the death of her husband, Z. Smith Reynolds, on July 6, 1932.

Two days earlier, she had testified from her bed. This time, she would be in the library of the couple's Reynolda estate.

Holman also had a larger crowd to play to, as a North Carolina judge had yielded to reporters' requests to open the inquest to the media. And Holman, a sultry torch singer, dressed for her audience, wearing a white negligee that left little to the imagination.

Holman was flanked by her mother and sister, who fanned her and carried smelling salts and handkerchiefs. In between fits of sobbing, Holman traced the short history of her marriage to Reynolds.

It had been one more step in the long journey for the former Elsbeth Holman, who after graduating from the University of Cincinnati in her hometown set out in 1924 for the lights of New York.

She and Reynolds had been introduced in 1930, and Reynolds began following Holman when she went on the road, performing in such places as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn. At the time, he was still a teenager, and still married to Anne Cannon, whose father was to towels what R.J. Reynolds had been to cigarettes.

Reynolds was barely 18 when he married Cannon in 1929 at 2 a.m. in York, S.C. The other attendees at the wedding: the bride's father, a judge and a policeman. A daughter was born the next year.

The marriage quickly went sour.

"She liked big parties and I liked little parties," Reynolds said about their differences.

Reynolds told Holman that he would soon be divorced, and in November 1931, he flew his wife to Reno to file for divorce.

Six days after the divorce, on Nov. 29, 1931, Holman and Reynolds were married in Monroe, Mich.

They kept the marriage a secret until May 12, when Holman registered at the Ambassador Hotel in New York as Mrs. Smith Reynolds. The New York Times broke the story soon after that.

"Well, we might as well admit it now as the newspapers have it anyway," Reynolds was quoted as saying. "We do not wish to give any interviews, however."

He was too young to make a will, and Reynolds told Holman he would not come into his estimated $20 million inheritance until he turned 28.

That didn't matter, Holman said. She offered to give up the stage and live quietly at Reynolda when they were married, but Reynolds wouldn't hear of it.

"I would not have married him at all because he was so young, but he appealed to me so," she told the inquest's jury. "He begged me so, saying, 'I need you now. I need someone. I never had any love in my life. I must have you. I am so lonely. Please.'"

Their married life was damned by the Reynolds money, Holman said.

"I wanted to live without the curse of all that money," she said, "but we could not get away from it."

She was asked about rumors that she and her husband had quarreled because he had recently discovered that she was Jewish, and that Reynolds had recently spent the Sunday before the shooting at the Hotel Robert E. Lee to get over the shock.

They had quarreled, Holman said, but not about her being Jewish.

Holman said that Reynolds became angry when he thought she shrank from his touch. When she told him that it was the other way around and it was he who jumped back when she put her hand on his leg, he became upset.

"I know I am going crazy and I'll have to get my head examined by a doctor," Reynolds told her, as he left the house.

The quarrel had blown over the next morning when Reynolds returned.

He cried and said, "Libby darling, I am so sorry. I am making you unhappy, I am afraid. How can you love me when I treat you like this?"

Her husband suffered from an inferiority complex, Holman said.

He always carried a pistol and six or seven times recently, Holman told her audience, he had put the gun to his head.

Holman brought out a suicide note Reynolds had written in 1927, while he was a student at Woodberry Forest, the exclusive prep school in Orange, Va. "My girl has turned me down. Goodbye forever. Give my love to Mary, Nancy, Dick etc. Goodbye cruel world. Smith."

When she was asked how some of her clothing came to be in the room of Reynolds' friend, Ab Walker, she said that Walker's room used to be her husband's and that sometimes she would go in there, remove some of her clothing and lie on the bed.

Her two hours of testimony was interrupted by fits of sobbing and dramatics, as the Winston-Salem Journal said in its account the next day.

"Despite evidences of suffering, Mrs. Reynolds went through her story in pretty good shape and not only supplied the dramatics, but even went so far as to volunteer several facts about her life with Smith."

After repeated questions about problems in the marriage, Holman said that Reynolds suffered from "male virility problems," and that he worried he could not satisfy her sexually.

"Oh, such agony, oh God," she said as she talked of Reynolds' impotency.

Her father, Alfred Holman, was in the audience. "Buck up," he told his daughter. "I can't bear it for you. I wish I could."

Holman testified that Reynolds begged her to have an affair with another man, though he didn't want to know who he was.

Suspicions about "the other man" centered on Walker, who was brought back to give a complete account of events the day of the party.

Around 10 the night of the party, Holman had thrown her arms around him and said, "Smith doesn't love me."

Walker said he thought that Holman was drunk.

Reynolds had seen the whole thing and told Walker that he blamed Holman.

"She's that kind of girl," Reynolds told Walker.

Walker said that Holman and Reynolds had been in his bedroom a few minutes before they retired for the night, but he had no idea how her clothes got in his room.

Most of those who testified at the inquest were friends of the Reynolds family or their servants. Ruby Jenkins was different. She was a nurse at Baptist Hospital, where Reynolds had died, and she didn't owe the Reynoldses any particular loyalty.

Jenkins testified that Holman had been given a private room at the hospital while she waited for news of her husband.

She had come into Holman's room, Jenkins said, and found Holman on the floor grappling with Walker. Holman was in her negligee. Walker was still in his bathing suit. Jenkins said she heard Walker tell Holman not to say anything.

She also heard Holman say, "Don't you know I'm going to have a baby?"

The remark called into question Holman's accounts of her husband's impotence. If he was impotent, then who was the father of her child?

For the Reynolds family, the claim was a bombshell. Reynolds had paid $1 million to settle claims by his ex-wife and daughter. Reynolds had died before he came into his inheritance, and a new heir could inherit his share of the estate.

After several hours of deliberation, the jury returned with its findings at 11:30 p.m. on July 11. Reynolds' death came from a bullet fired by "a party or parties unknown to the jury."

The grand jury, which was also meeting, did not take any action.

By the beginning of August, Holman and Walker had both left town.

The matter might have ended there, except for something Walker had told several party guests: "There's some secret about this matter that I'm going to take to my grave."