The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism

Epilogue

Epilogue Less than a week after Chapin’s death, New York literary agent George T. Bye received a letter from Eleanor Early, a writer in Boston. The contents intrigued him. ‘‘I know a girl who carried on a correspondence with Mr. Chapin in Sing Sing,’’ Early wrote. Would Bye be interested in selling them to a publisher? Maybe they could be called ‘‘Letters from a Prison Garden’’? Early had selected the right agent. Bye counted many newspapermen among his clients, having been one himself until he opened his agency in , and his specialty was books by people in the news. He immediately replied to Early by telegram. ‘‘By all means send on Chapin letters undoubtedly important project.’’1 Chapin had kept all his correspondence under lock and key in his prison office desk, but it all disappeared with his death. Nelson , however, had preserved his letters to her in a safe-deposit box in Wisconsin and now felt compelled to publish them to counter what she saw as an unfair portrayal of Chapin in the press. ‘‘In the letters Charles Chapin had written to me,’’ she said, ‘‘he had revealed his soul and shown a side which the world never knew.’’ Nelson also believed Chapin would approve. ‘‘Dear child,’’ he once said to Nelson when she mentioned the idea of publishing his letters, ‘‘if you can find anyone to publish them, or what would be harder—to read them, and it would please you, I hope you do so.’’ After all the hurt Chapin had caused her, Nelson still clung to her charitable vision of him. In the book, and to the press on the day it was be released, she said, ‘‘If these letters can make you know, as I did, the other side of a forceful figure, and make you see him as I did, a great and gallant man who even in tragedy  The Rose Man of Sing Sing never dipped his colors, then I know I have rendered him the last and greatest service in my power.’’2 Within a month, Bye sold the project to Simon and Schuster. Max Schuster still remembered Chapin from his youth when he worked as a copy boy for the Evening World. Bye also tried to entice the editor of Ladies Home Journal, who had worked as a reporter under Chapin, to do a feature on the letters. The editor declined because he thought the business of Chapin killing his wife might not go over well with his readers. Bye found, too, that Hollywood had only a ‘‘lukewarm’’ interest in the film rights to the letters. Simon and Schuster, however, remained enthusiastic. They advanced $ to Early and Nelson to compile and edit the letters, and for Early to write a lengthy introduction. The plan to which they agreed was that Nelson’s identity would be shielded. The book would appear under the name The Constance Letters of Charles Chapin, edited by Eleanor Early and Constance. The two women worked together rapidly. Early interviewed Nelson at length, and the pair pored over the letters. They completed their work by June . As the publication date neared, the relationship between the two became testy, and Nelson began reconsidering her anonymity. Early was panicked that this might kill the project, so she urgently wrote Bye to enlist him in keeping Nelson to the original plan. ‘‘If she remains a lovely lady of mystery, people will be interested , and do a lot of conjecturing,’’ she wrote. ‘‘But if she comes right flat out— pounds of her—where is the lovely romance? I believe if Constance is visioned as the frail young girl—beautiful in soul, body, and mind—that the letters conjure, people are going to enjoy them. But do you think they are going to be very thrilled about an affair between a -year-old man and a fat, middle -age woman?’’ Nelson was talked out of it, and the public never learned who she was.3 Meanwhile, Cooper also was approaching publishers with her collection of Chapin letters. As Nelson had done, Cooper sought to remain anonymous by titling her collection The Uncensored Letters of Charles Chapin and using only ‘‘Viola Irene’’ as her name. Rudolph Field agreed to bring out the slim volume comprising Chapin’s letters to Cooper from  and , before prison regulations on mail were tightened. Cooper said she se- lected that period because Chapin’s letters...